Hyphenated

"Mihir Chiitre's Hyphenated is an excellent debut collection of poems where the private and the public aspects of the urban experience feed and enrich each other. Anger here leads to apocalypse and observation to contemplation. Mihir's urban world is populated by paanwallas and tea sellers, eunuchs and prostitutes, drunkards and devotees, rikshawwalas and the railway station mobs, but there are too times when he finds that reality has been overrated and likes to retreat into his private world of love, desire and despair.

His is a magic world of barbecued afternoons, women unfolding like short stories, nights like infinite staircases, city as a vortex of ancient water, breeze that climbs the decrepit barricade of his coy childhood like a thief, loquacious ripples on the taciturn lake and book marks like broken bridges to a nowhere. Mihir's insistence on avoiding the cliché ('no rose blossoms in this rhyme', he says) and being loyal to his personal experience have really paid off and here we have a bunch of poems that are fresh, honest and full of promise."

Mihir Chitre (b. 1988) was brought up and is still put up in Mumbai, India. His poetry has appeared in various Indian and international literary journals and anthologies including Kritya, Enchanting Verses, Pyrta Journal, Brown Critique, Muse India, Blue and Yellow Dog, Reading Hour, The Challenge, Baroda Pamphlet, Nether Magazine and Dance of the Peacock among others. Mihir has read his poetry at two of Sahitya Akademi's national events - the Young Writers' Meet in Baroda in 2012 and Young Voices in Delhi in 2014.

I have been a lot of people; at times, simultaneously, all or some of those; at other times, struggling to be even one of those. Most of these different selves were induced by time, lasted for a phase and then lay quarantined till they overlapped, and often clashed, with the others.

To put that in context, this book is a collection of poems written over a span of 5 years: 2009 to 2014. During this time, the world shifted its balance, changed its rules: a starlit street reached a dead-end; compromises began to win mental elections; reality wasn't singular anymore; and winters turned taciturn. If all poetry is a combined reaction of the conscious and the subconscious mind to the exterior, then this collection might struggle for coherence, for the sheer vastness of experiences these poems are reactions to.

In my world, coherence is not a necessity, themes are an illusion, and chronological order is vapid. If the exclusiveness of each of these sixty-four poems is so significant, why then are they all housed in a single collection.

**Contents and Sample Pages**