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Nights at the Calcutta Cafe is a searing set of poems in quest for lost worlds. It is based on an eponymous poetry reading curated by Peter and Naina Dey. Breath-taking. Deeply moving. A citadel of floating memories... slowly lighting up with new life! There's an alchemy of fusion in remembered sights, sounds and dreams, the way they recreate beloved moments or broken ones fused in us forever. It erupts into sudden action In A Privileged Glimpse of the Dead-where graves are dug up to find the truth being denied; and meanders slowly Down the Ganga, or memory lane, or Park Street, The Girl on the Phone looking for signs, making space for the reader's own solitary gains. Calcutta Cafe looms up against a dark sky-warm, cosy lit up with the promise of food, poetry and solace, the perfect imaginary setting for brilliant poetics, and friends-Smeetha Bhoumik, founder of the Women Empowered India group and the WE Literary Circle: Nights at the Calcutta Café serves us primordial, limitless, audacious verses with metaphysical intimacy, warmth and idiosyncratic dishes-silently transforming our everyday culinary experiences into revelatory linguistic and aestheic joys of longing and belonging across cities in the world. Verses from New York to Kokata, in this mesmerizing collection, speak in multiple tongues celebrating the language of univesal symbols, signs and signposts.-Ashwani Kumar, poet, author and academic in Mumbai The poems in Nights at the Calcutta Café, offer a transcontinental bridge whose arch confidently strides across transatlantic distances in a dialogue that interweaves the consciousness of Indian and American poets, as they address a global audience. Brought together virtually in COVID times, they embody the fortitude and resilience of individuals and communities that sustain the generations as they celebrate the human capacity to heal, in the face of tragedy, suffering and loss. These poems combine mystical wonder with the power of love and hope, made possible with the audacity that only poets have the courage to voice with confidence.-Dr Bashabi Fraser, CBE, Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing, Edinburgh Napier University

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Dr. Peter Schulman is a Professor of French and International Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern French Eccentric (Purdue UP, 2003) as well as Le Dernier Livre du Siècle (Romillat, 2001) with Mischa Zabotin. He has translated Jules Verne's last novel The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz; George Simenon's The 13 Culpritsas well as a meditation on waves by Marie Darrieussecq, On Waves; Suburban Beauty from poet Jacques Reda; Adamah from poet Celine Zins; Ying Chen's collection of haiku Impressions of Summer and Virginie Beauregard D's The Last Runners and Silvia Baron Supervielle's Pages of Travel. He is currently co-editor in chief of ajournal of eco-criticism, Green Humanities with Josh Weinstein and has co-edited the following books: The Marketing of Eros: Performance, Sexuality and Consumer Culture (2003); Chasing Esther: Jewish Expressions of Cultural Difference (2006) and Rhine Crossings: France and German in Love and War (SUNY Press, 2005). His translation of Marie Nimier's playAnother Year, Another Christmas (Noel revient tous les ans) was performed by the Haberdasher Theater company in Columbus Ohio and New York City in November 2017. Dr. Somrita Urni Ganguly is a professor, and award-winning poet and literary translator. She was a Fulbright Doctoral Research Fellow at Brown University, and is an alumna of the University of East Anglia's International Literary Translation and Creative Writing Summer School. Somrita served as a judge for the PEN America Translation Prize, and the Kamala Das Poetry Awards, and an Expert Reader for the English PEN Translation Grant, the National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant offered by the US federal government, and the National Translation Award (US). She is currently Head of the Department of English, Maharaja Manindra Chandra College, University of Calcutta, and has worked on literary translation projects with Room to Read, USA, and the National Centre for Writing, UK. Her work has been showcased at the London Book Fair, and she has read in cities like Bloomington, Bombay, Boston, Calcutta, Cove, Delhi, Hyderabad, London, Miami, Providence, and Singapore. Somrita edited the first anthology of food poems, Quesadilla and Other Adventures (2019), and translated 3 Stories: Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay (2021), Firesongs (2019), Shakuni (2019), and The Midnight Sun: Love Lyrics and Farewell Songs (2018), among other works

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