This collection brings together seventy-five poems by three renowned contemporary Tamil poets, whose works stand at the forefront of modern Tamil poetry. All three poets have experienced the pain and dislocation of recent Sri Lankan violence, the rupture of traditional life and the anguish of mass exile, all of which constantly inform their works. Each has created from these experiences a distinct and modern poetics, drawing from the same rich two-thousand-year-old culture.

Chelva Kanaganayakam is currently an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. His publications include Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar Ghose (1993); Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and Their World (1995) and Dark Antonyms and Paradise: The Poetry of Rienzi Crusz (1997).

Chelva Kanaganayakam's profile page

Dr. R. Cheran is a Tamil Canadian academic, poet, playwright, and journalist. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Windsor in Canada. He has authored over fifteen books in Tamil, and his work has been translated into twenty languages. Several volumes of his work have been published in English translation, including The Second Sunrise (translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom, 2010), In a Time of Burning (translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom and Sascha Ebeling, 2013), and You Cannot Turn Away (translated by Chelva Kanaganayakam, 2011). His poems in English translation have also been published in numerous literary magazines, such as Bomb (New York), Modern Poetry in Translation, Many Mountains Moving, Exiled Ink, Mantra Review, and Talisman.

R. Cheran's profile page

V.I.S. Jayapalan's profile page