ZOOM INTERVIEW
I: How long will you say you are in limbo, like an altered state, or creating a Beatrice in your
mind, undesirable, inaccessible? Could it be that you ghost yourself?
L: My motion is my process. Gestate or bleed into cup. I am afraid to read my own writing,
or a text that looks like me. I say no to the edits, the revisions, the manipulations.
I: Is a moving on purely physical then, in your work, or your abandon? Would it not serve
you to situate? To hibernate? Maximize efficiency and output? Must you give yourself away
like that?
L: I am honest in another country. I write or say for no money. Thus, I keep leaving itself,
like a spare tire. Like a figment, a borderland? I depart from your question, I think.
I: You don’t. Depart is two. You are many. Do you write while looking out an open window
onto the gray hills, or do you write worse with the window up, yourself transposed onto
passing by?
L: I did not write. Did I not notice that he had not read a single thing or is that why I did not
speak into some self-imposed exile? Would it have been easier to keep running?
I: I ask the questions here. Why evade yourself in this way? Why the liminal fetish? Your
emerging gone? You were never really here.
L: You’re right. I was there. You answered your own question this time. The road was just an excuse.
Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay is an Indian-born epic poem collage stranger and break-up with America tour—on self-imposed exile from New Nashville, and the author of the books this is our war (Penmanship Press, Brooklyn, 2016) and everything is always leaving (M.C. Sarkar & Sons, Kolkata, 2019), and poetry album i don’t know anyone here (2020). She was the first Nashville Youth Poet Laureate, finalist for the first National Youth Poet Laureate, and Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. With a Masters in Migration and Diaspora at SOAS and a Masters in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, find her work in Poetry Society of America, La Piccioletta Barca, and Cream City Review, among others. Her latest book Towards a Poetic Memory of Bengal Partition came out with Natyachinta in December 2023. She is the poet-in-residence with the band JAWARI.