Boki.. A word that means nothing in English, but when you come to the poem that it’s in – well, there it stands for a shouted syllable, a deconstruction of someone’s name — someone who “went around / with scowling hair, // her long betel-spittled / lips exploding sex-words” while “She sat in street-corners / and exposed glistening secrets / like roots with / shifty-eyed knowledge.” A “nonsense” word that brings so much from its two syllables, is surely what poetry is about. The creation of image from sound. “To bok” in Assamese means to mutter/speak meaninglessly and repetitively. The Sanskrit word, Vak, from which this irreverent Assamese derivative takes its origins, means Speech. And Nitoo Das’s Boki speaks in an explosion of images in which she demonstrates an uncanny ability to create poems that surprise us, hold us, move us to see things in new ways. “A poem / laughs / when you tell it to sit.” These poems not only laugh but insist on dancing. They taste “lush and orange” on the tongue like Disco-Papita, and they will leave you turning the pages for more.

Das’ poetry more than delivers on the promise made in the penultimate lines of her titular Cyborg Proverbs, offering its reader the gift of penetrating (in)sight through thoughts “as precise as suspicion”. Her syllables breathe aloud, like hushes that unassumingly gasp in the gaps between echoes, in the interstitial moments of alighting bird wings, or roots that braid the air, or the slipperiness of netted fish, and the gush of rain as it nestles its way into the crevices of walls and swells its way through its parasitical, residential act.

Das exquisitely reimagines syntax and her frequently anthropomorphic poems shape-shift upon each ensuing page, making Cyborg Proverbs an enviable feat, aided in no small measure by her studied, patient, bird-watcher gaze and her unspeakable lust for articulating the tacitly sensual.