Shakespearewalis: Verses on the Bard. By Shweta Garg, Shashikala Assella, Sureshika Piyasena, and Ipsita Sengupta

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This is a collection for our times – from four women poets who have taken on Shakespeare, and their love, during the pandemic. The fact that they were in conversation with each other about a literary figure and his works, and worked towards this anthology is evidence that we humans (at least the women) can work together during the toughest of times, times that push us and lock us into our own individual resources. We have the capacity to overcome anything.

They show too that we the former colonized can also overcome our own colonization, read the texts the colonizers were excessively proud of, read our own resistances and appropriations, think through it all, and come up with an anthology of poems that demonstrate that we can critique that we love, accept the love even as we can read the contexts that gave us that love, celebrate the love with joy and irony and humor and clear-sighted acceptance.

The four Shakespeare Walis, Shweta Garg, Shashikala Assella, Sureshika Piyasena, and Ipsita Sengupta, from two different countries (India and Sri Lanka), united by their education at the same university (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), and their love for Shakespeare (which they must have developed earlier!), have their voices even if they write on the same topics. They write on women characters (with interesting twists – one making the boy actor ‘come out’ as Juliet), write on the ‘twisted’ men (of course), write (very appealing) appropriations, and in a final section called “Shakespearewalis to Shakespeare,” in a series of very funny poems, they comment on his plays, his characters, his writing, and him!

But then all the poems in this anthology work as a commentary on Shakespeare’s works by four feisty subcontinental women who can see the humor in their readings and display it in verse and make you part of their literary journey. This is good poetry and good criticism. Shakespeare is in their good books and this book will be a good addition to the Shakespearean library, to read in good times and bad.—Prof. GJV Prasad

This is a collection for our times – from four women poets who have taken on Shakespeare, and their love, during the pandemic. The fact that they were in conversation with each other about a literary figure and his works, and worked towards this anthology is evidence that we humans (at least the women) can work together during the toughest of times, times that push us and lock us into our own individual resources. We have the capacity to overcome anything.

They show too that we the former colonized can also overcome our own colonization, read the texts the colonizers were excessively proud of, read our own resistances and appropriations, think through it all, and come up with an anthology of poems that demonstrate that we can critique that we love, accept the love even as we can read the contexts that gave us that love, celebrate the love with joy and irony and humor and clear-sighted acceptance.

The four Shakespeare Walis, Shweta Garg, Shashikala Assella, Sureshika Piyasena, and Ipsita Sengupta, from two different countries (India and Sri Lanka), united by their education at the same university (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), and their love for Shakespeare (which they must have developed earlier!), have their voices even if they write on the same topics. They write on women characters (with interesting twists – one making the boy actor ‘come out’ as Juliet), write on the ‘twisted’ men (of course), write (very appealing) appropriations, and in a final section called “Shakespearewalis to Shakespeare,” in a series of very funny poems, they comment on his plays, his characters, his writing, and him!

But then all the poems in this anthology work as a commentary on Shakespeare’s works by four feisty subcontinental women who can see the humor in their readings and display it in verse and make you part of their literary journey. This is good poetry and good criticism. Shakespeare is in their good books and this book will be a good addition to the Shakespearean library, to read in good times and bad.—Prof. GJV Prasad

Shweta Garg is an Artist and faculty at Humanities and Social Sciences at DA-IICT. A former Fulbright scholar, she has degrees in English literature from Gujarat University, JNU and IIT Roorkee.

Shashikala Assella is a Senior Lecturer teaching English literature at the Department of English, University of Kelaniya. Her main research and teaching are on postcolonial literature, women’s writing and science fiction while her continuing interest in popular culture, especially audiovisual productions from a global cultural arena, makes her watch too many movies and other cultural productions.

Sureshika Piyasena is an accomplished poet with a PhD in English from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her poems have been published in Skeletons: An Anthology of Poetry (USA), The Black Rose of Winter (UK), Bridge of Fates (UK), Greek Fire (UK), Temptation (UK), Shout it Out (UK), Jeans: A Memorial (Sri Lanka), Misfit Quill, Primrose Road Poetry (Sri Lanka) and, This House We Live In (USA). Her debut collection of poems titled Little Lost Loves was published in May 2021 which is a chapbook on the theme of miscarriages and infant loss. This is her second collection of poems.

Dr Ipsita Sengupta is an Associate Professor in English at Bankura University, India, where she is currently Head of the Department. She did her B.A. at Presidency College and M.A., M.Phil. and PhD at Jawaharlal Nehru University. A recipient of the Australia-India Council Australian Studies Fellowship, she has contributed book chapters and research papers in peer-reviewed international and national journals e.g. Southerly, Antipodes, Indian Journal of Australian Studies and highly-acclaimed anthologies like Australia’s Asia (2012), published by the University of Western Australia Press. Her research interests include Indo-Australian connections, comparative studies, dialogue and translations between spaces and cultures across elusive pasts and emergent posts, trans-studies and South Asia studies.