Shabdkosh (2013)

"Shabdkosh (A Dictionary) occurs in the silences between poems. A contemplation of the need to be heard against the imperatives of forgetting. Many forms of "last records" are conjured to create "deceased time". A time that is not simply un-alive but has a force much beyond the world of the living. Salvador Allende’s haunting last speech hangs in the air mingling with Vidrohi’s obsession with being recorded, while images of hunters and the hunted slowing trickle in. All these together form the skin of the question that Spicer asks of Lorca: "What did you want to do with a poem once it was over?" Should "silence" and "records" always be placed antithetically, or can a new imagination of practice emerge from the world of the forgotten and the misplaced?" – Pallavi Paul