balancing acts by Ajay Kumar

“These are raw and vulnerable poems that both bare and hide themselves in the unassuming garb of lowercase beauty. Ajay Kumar’s images surprise and stun where ‘the shape of commas’ is ‘full-stops growing tails like tadpoles / smudged by a wet touch’, while at other times, much like his poems, they surprise with their plain and honest directness where ‘a fat lizard is / is a fat lizard’. Among contemporary poets, Ajay’s ease and skill with wielding syntax without losing the emotional heart of the poem is something to look out for.”

— Kunjana Parashar, Poet and Associate Editor of The Bombay Literary Magazine

“Ajay Kumar’s writing has that rare quality of catching the miraculous real in medias res—each word’s labour wrought effortless with the iridescence of movement. Intimate moments charged with feeling accumulate slowly in the plots of his poems. His poetic imagination transforms material and psychological realities, turning language into a living thing, giving sensation to experience. Metaphor frees the poems, pulling the reader right into the vortex of his evocative world. This is an honest voice filled with wonder, and a profound contemplation of human emotion, speaking in an idiom that is compellingly contemporary.”

— Aranya, Poet and Curator of Poetly

About the Author:

Ajay Kumar grew up in Pune and Chennai and now lives in Hyderabad where he is a student of Literary and Cultural Studies. His poems have appeared in Usawa, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Rattle, The Bombay Review, and the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2021, among others.