Clamour for a Handful of Rice

Know about the book -

Clamour for a Handful of Rice is written by Sonnet Mondal and published by Copper Coin Publishing Pvt Ltd. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 8199199881 (ISBN 10) and 9788199199880 (ISBN 13).

Sonnet Mondal’s Clamour for a Handful of Rice reaches behind the eyes of the body of hunger to examine what drives our deeper selves. This is no lofty observational tower but a poet who bears witness and reflects, whether in the mirror or through testament of the city’s poor who with empty stomachs and begging hands/….still smile near car windows. Mondal’s book challenges our sense of awareness, negotiating the ways we cope with the suffering of others through action or the consequences of inaction. What do we hunger for and how is it sated? Mondal’s Clamour reaches beyond the metaphor of food to humanity’s hunger for war and greed and its observational contrasts of the haves and have nots. Teenagers at the bazaar help their parents/sell meat, fish and vegetables while watching the face/of school-bound children. These are hard realities consumed through the acute understanding of a world that grapples daily with inequities. Mondal is fierce in the quality of his attention to the world and the larger philosophical questions which hold gravitas and yet, a tenderness for what keeps us alive. Lois P. Jones, author of Night Ladder In Clamour for a Handful of Rice, Sonnet Mondal’s poems areborn out of hunger, a hunger for peace, a hunger for documentation, and a hunger that calls back our ghosts. Where do they go, these ghosts that haunt our lives? Mondal has an answer: With the bombs they have dropped/and the famines they have wreaked,/they will be left with no destination. In these poems, hope is a bullet-cracked mirror, and the dead point to those who kill and to those who resist to kill, their open mouths a poem starving for justice. Octavio Quintanilla, Poet Laureate of Texas Elegant and clear-sighted, Mondal's Clamour for a Handful of Rice is a collection of real poise and vision. Aphoristic and incisive, it is a book driven by distinct and memorable imagery which emerges from a graceful, often conversational mode. Essentially a humanist reflection, it is littered with a deceptive intensity. Steven J Fowler, writer, poet and performer Sonnet Mondal’s collection, Clamour for a Handful of Rice, carries full-bodied poems that burn into your consciousness and conscience, and thus stand out against the common run of ‘intellectual’, ‘technical’ poems. Drawing-room Poets is the title of one of his poems. Each poem is a unique experience. Beginning with the opening, eponymous poem, and running through several more in quick succession, all the poems in the opening section, and many later ones too, carry the images, symbols, wounds, scars and devastation of war, beside the spectre of which we live our daily lives today. There are other poems about violence found everywhere, dissent, protest, hunger, destiny…in short everything that embraces life. Poetry, indeed, is a continuous meditation on life, living and dying. A J Thomas, poet, translator and editor