Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag was born in Calcutta, India and now lives in on Treaty lands in Mississauga, Ontario. His poems have been widely published in Canadian literary magazines and a growing number of anthologies. Nag is a graduate of the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and the Humber School for Writers. He also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Nag is an educator, editor and technical writer.
Poetry
The Alphabet of Aliens
Toronto: Mawenzi House, 2025.
forthcoming October
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
The dreamlike, eerily atmospheric prose poems in this collection interrogate margins and melt points of migrancy. Intensely personal, funny, enchanting, and fantastical, it is at once an ambitious autobiography and a dream book, a diary and a field guide. Here, the hybridity of the form serves both as a device of subversion and as an ocular pointing at space and stars, forests and rivers, rupture and belonging. Here wounds multiply in a potato. The soul can be photographed. A mirror hides in a discarded baguette. A phantomlike empty coat in Bardo becomes a bloated pumpkin. The mood is playful, the tone deliberately whimsical, giving voice to discourses on passage, arrival and the rootlessness of migrant diasporas.
Poetry
Bloodlines
Calcutta: Writers Worship, 2006.
Poetry
Could You Please, Please Stop Singing?
Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 2016.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
In Could You Please, Please Stop Singing, Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag takes a step away from skepticism, blending humour with shock and surprise, seeking a return to childhood in “Mamuda’s Fries,” innocence in “Conversations with the Country Activist” and fractals for the future in the yet to be invented “Seedless Avocado.” In attempting what Tomas Transromer calls “walking through walls,” Nag hurts and sickens himself with awe and rage. The title poem “Could You Please, Please Stop Singing?” purposely evokes the famous Hemingway line from Men Without Women and is central to the overall tonality of this collection, that straddles a path alternately mocking and dead serious, and that occasionally yields to contrary pulls between the banal and the sublime.
Poetry
Uncharted
Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2020.
PS8627.A483 U73 2021
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Moving through geographies; through everyday bric-a-brac; through apparitions inherited and invented; through matters of flesh and make-believe this collection weaves portraits of violence, despair and bewilderment, generating a range of new relationships and meaning. Informed equally by circumstances of race, history and politics, each poem in the collection attempts to push language by playfully re-examining the old or by making new metaphors borne from narratives that are sometimes moral, religious, political and metaphysical. Uncharted is an urgent response to a world in conflict.
Fiction
Hands Like Trees
Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2023.
E-book (Access restricted to members of the university community)
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
An act of passion reverberates across continents when Visma Sen decides to remain in Calcutta when his family migrates to Canada.
Sabyasachi Nag evokes the rising heat of Calcutta in the early morning as masterfully as he depicts the calmness of a snow-lit evening street in Brampton, Ontario while the entangled lives of the Sens of Shulut unfurl over three decades. Each linked story is told through the voice of a different member of the Sen family, from Nilroy’s movingly excruciating first day as caregiver to Aunt Rita with dementia to Milli’s ambition to host her guru Mata G. The experiences of each character draw a portrait of the Sen family, whose wounds drive them to pursue an ever-elusive happiness, while clearly yearning for identity and belonging.
Links
Sabyasachi Nag personal website
Publisher Mansfield Press
Publisher Mawenzi House
Publisher Mosaic Press
Publisher Ronsdale Press