Daffodils and forget-me-nots smile under the Autumn Sun.

A poem about the Fall.

Eight mighty titans, unleashing their wrath!

A series of poems also reflect his ecological sensitivity to the machine in the garden and snakes and hyenas imperiling forests and rivers and Dhaka—the city he has lived in for most of his life.

Nineteen performers recited poems in Bangla and English, their topics ranging from nostalgia, personal growth and daydreams to mental health, death, and trauma.

Protiti’s poems are mostly ‘bare’ conversational musings exploring ‘selfhood, separation, exile, love and longing’.

A fine good morning poem

A late summer in June,

Morning sun, and its endearing ardor swathes my spent body, I awake a ghost.

The poems ranged from mental health issues to individual freedom of expression and every musing in between.

The evening of September 8 at The Daily Star Centre saw an outpouring of verses to a live and very interactive audience. Daily Star Books and SHOUT jointly launched our series of Slam Poetry Nights—an evening, every month, of verses recited in the spirit of creative freedom.

The aim of a dohakar has always been to open the eyes of the masses. Many of the dohas written by the two prominent dohakars, Soroho-Pa and Kabir Das, have modernist, anti-establishment themes, criticising the social, political and religious conventions of their times. 

He had lost touch almost completely with his craft, so much so that he wondered if he even had it in him. But even so, for the sake of writing, he wrote. When the pandemic hit, Helal batted off the dust of his desk and sat down to write. Sitting from a foreign land, the ink flowed again.

Poignant lines on wishful death

A love poem

Chulbul, who has written 29 books of poetry in his career spanning 9 months, characterises his style as introspective, post-modernist neo-absurdism.

Maybe I loved her so because we were daughters of the same soil, to some extent, at least. It made me smile. But I also sneered at myself a little bit, because her soil had also ripped apart mine for over 200 years.

The poems of Shamsur Rahman, Al Mahmud, and Shahid Qadri have been translated by Kaiser Haq, M Harunur Rashid, Kabir Chowdhury, Zillur Rahman Siddiqui and Rifat Munim for the edition.

Familiarity has its uncanny essence, like patchwork sewn by your mother.

Zaman has classified the pieces in two groups: "the early stories focus on the events that took place on 21 February—the processions, the police action and the deaths—while the later ones show how the attitude to Bangla has changed in these 70 years.