Proma Tagore

Proma Tagore was born in Kolkata, India and moved to Canada as a child.  Tagore earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English at McGill University.  Her Ph.D. dissertation is entitled “The Shapes of Silence: Contemporary Women’s Fiction and the Practice of Bearing Witness.”  Her first book also called The Shapes of Silence, is likely a revision of her dissertation. Tagore now lives and works in Vancouver and Victoria, B.C. Tagore was a finalist for the 2014 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers.

Poetry

Language is not the Only Thing that Breaks: Poems

Vancouver:  Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011.
PS8639 .A33 L35 2011

Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)

In this extraordinary debut poetry collection, Proma Tagore’s language is not the only thing that breaks explores the junctions between migration, race, the body, and desire. The poems in this book offer spaces to reflect on a variety of interlinking issues: the routes and brutal legacies of European colonization and imperialism; the interrelations between different experiences of migration or displacement and attendant geographies of water, land, place, or home; the politics of globalization, capitalism, settlement, and war; the real and symbolic maps of our many dislocations and journeys and, consequently, our multiply layered memories, dreams, and desires. Amidst the ongoing everyday realities of racism and war that have resulted from long-standing histories of colonization, language is not the only thing that breaks offers small, delicate moments of being―a personal and moving response to a world where many people experience profound levels of dehumanization.