DescriptionI believe the language of poetry always delves deep into the psyche of a writer to connect her history and culture with a larger but fragmentary body of language, literature, and lore that constitute identities. NARRATIVE LIMITS AND OTHER POEMS reflects on concepts such as borders and boundaries, insider and outsider, dispossessed and empowered, categorized and unhinged -- how the (geo)political becomes the linguistic and material. Owing to my upbringing in Assam by parents of the Subcontinental Partition generation, issues of geography and belonging have been a constant question even while I was accorded a Western education. Given that many South Asians still struggle with fragmented identities marked by regions, religions, cartographic lines and other labels, I was encouraged to recognize the legacy of the modern Assamese poet-songwriter Bhupen Hazarika and the ancient Sufi poet Hasan Raja of Bengal in the same breath. The former‟s vision of a world inspired by Paul Robeson‟s show boat song and the latter‟s mystic philosophy of all things disparate provide a narrative thread in this collection. Édouard Glissant‟s notion of the tout-monde (whole world) of human interculturalism and cultural fragmentation in the face of a totalitarian order is also a major influence on my poetry. Questions of „documentation‟ and „orality‟ – not just Glissant‟s reference to a slave ship where the only written „book‟ was the ledger containing exchange value of slaves, but also histories of the South Asian subcontinent – loom as important issues. These poems are a reflection on the interconnectedness of “narratives” that are shaped by identities and sometimes orally transmitted. The collection is divided into three parts – 1. Moonlore from the East, 2. Newsroom Novena, 3. In Perspective. The first part deals with narrations of perceived tradition. The second part is an account of our times, while the third part aims to collate fragmented realities for the speaker as well as for the subject addressed. NARRATIVE LIMITS is impacted both by deep imagism and realism, and owes its existence to diverse masters such as Kay Ryan, Lucille Clifton, Hiren Gohain, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Hass, Wislawa Szymborska and Arun Kolatkar, to name just a few.