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Collected Furies
“Most famous authors overshadow their books, but Taslima Nasreen is different. The Bangladeshi poet, novelist, essayist and memoirist, as things stand, is better known to the non-Bengali world for what she says than how she writes. At 45, the woman who trained and worked as a medical doctor in Dhaka before she fled her country is probably the world’s most prolific underground writer, with at least six of her 30 books officially banned in her country and the rest selling mostly under cover.” >> Read the whole story.Read More
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Chilean TV interview with Adrienne Rich
Here is just one of the remarkable comments Rich makes here: “It’s in the writing of a poem that you find out what you’re not saying, and it’s in the writing of a poem that you find what you’re still having to push up against or what you’re still having to rethink, to re-imagine….”Read More
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The Game in Reverse
I’ve been struggling to find time for an extended commentary on Taslima Nasrin’s book The Game in Reverse, but it looks like it’s not going to happen. So let me just say that this 10-year-old publication by the Bangladeshi poet, novelist and essayist is the perfect antidote to the squishy vapidity of so much American verse.Read More
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Fatwa, Schmatwa…
I shouldn’t be flip, of course, about a serious situation. No, I’m not talking the famous Salman Rushdie. I’m talking about a fascinating Bengali feminist poet named Taslima Nasrin, whose life has been threatened by the usual suspects. The latest news is not encouraging. Here’s an example of the kind of writing that’s gotten Taslima Nasrin in trouble: MOSQUE, TEMPLE Let the pavilions of religion be ground to bits,let the bricks of temples, mosques, guruduaras, churches be burned in blind fire,and upon those heaps of destructionlet lovely flower gardens grow, spreading their fragrance,let children’s schools and study halls grow.Read More