Poetry is a prayerful medium to explore complex, living concepts. Just as fruit falls from the bough to decay within earth and feed the tree, Rajorshi Patranabis’s presents the ritual of cyclical love and devotion in his new collection. By Dustin Pickering

‘Your book felt like the scent of passing months, layered with flowers, rain, spring and autumn—a scent that reached into the city’s deep burrows.’ By Sufia Khatoon

Haroon Khalid’s 2024 novel From Waris to Heer (Penguin) is an answer to the refrain of timeless stories—a tale of love and loss, power and rebellion, retold with the lilt of a Sufi melody. By Amritesh Mukherjee

Set against a backdrop of religious abuse and suffocating intolerance, Sohali Rauf’s Blasphear is a sharp commentary on the ideas of nationhood, and how its intangible forces act as blind shepherds, leading the masses down paths they cannot question. By Amritesh Mukherjee

The ecopoems in Gopal Lahiri’s Anemone Morning delve into a kind of exploratory myth that engages readers with creative potential, stressing that there could be no division between who we are and where we are. By Dustin Pickering

Prashanth Srivatsa’s The Spice Gate as a spectacular debut fantasy, a feast to the readers who slurp on worldbuilding, while also making them wonder if a freer world is possible. By Akankshya Abismruta

“I was chasing this desire to pin down the inexplicable when I wrote Mad Sisters, but acknowledge that it is inexplicable. It sort-of grew in the novel, intwining with the cosmos and the idea of the sublime, and how the interpersonal is the tether that keeps us sane—and perhaps caged.” By Akankshya Abismruta

Sanket Mhatre poems in A City Full of Sirens address and interrogate the relations between ‘the eternal’ and ‘the transient’ in a nuanced manner, tearing into the expansive multiplicities of singular moments. By Ankush Banerjee

Published in India’s 75th year of Independence, Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (2022) presents unique and diverse voices from the diaspora, with poems that are a sustained discussion with history, oneself, the environment, myth, science, and relationships. By Dustin Pickering

In The Solitude of a Shadow, Devibharathi presents a complex picture of a vengeance-seeking narrator fractured by trauma, caste, and identity crisis. By Sneha Pathak

Amitava Kumar’s The Yellow Book: A Traveller's Diary (2023), conceptualizes the journal itself as an art object, where the act of journaling becomes a form of artistic practice. By Pranavi Sharma

Kiriti Sengupta’s Oneness (2024) is a condensed capsule of poetry, one that weaves multiple strains of being into an organic unity. With his vivid and sonic juxtapositions, the compositions in the new collection both obfuscate and enlighten the reader. By Ajanta Paul