Book Details:
- Moments Publication
- Hybrid Literature
- 978-9384180782
- ISBN-10: 9384180785
Paperback
- 1st Edition
- September 24, 2014
English
- 62
- 5.5 x 0.2 x 8.5 inches
- 4.6 ounces
About The Reverse Tree
This book deals with the gender issues with alternating prose and poetry that has been used to good use by touching reality and blending the lyrics into it to make things more concrete rather than leaving it at the abstractness of poetry. This reminds you of Virginia Woolf’s comment that the androgynous mind is the most creative: you would get it explained here in a poem that Sengupta recounts to have written while reading a fellow poet’s work that had been written from the point of view of the opposite gender. The Aristophanic idea [that every one of us were born with the sexual orientation of male/male, male/female and female/female, but then God cut us off in halves and let us to find our other selves in the other male or female that would complete us] has been impressed upon when Sengupta cites examples from the Vedas and asks, “What is wrong in being gay?” There are lines from a poem that one cannot possibly help quoting: “I worship the sun/ powered by the rays/ my she gives her all/ as my he turns gay”.
Noted academic and critic, Prof. Bishnupada Ray, connects this “surreal tree” of Sengupta’s to the tree that bore the forbidden fruit, the golden tree in Roman mythology and the Yggdrasil of the Norse myths and writes: “Perhaps all these trees get connected in the surreal tree that Kiriti Sengupta presents us in his latest book The Reverse Tree, which he describes as a crisis-management autobiographical philosophy. The man-woman problematic leads him toreverse the fallen man-tree towards the original androgynous ardhanariswar posi tion but he turns it upside down keeping in view the contemporary gender issues to show his reverse tree caught in a time warp.” This, perhaps, is the essence of The ReverseTree.