Nandini Dhar’s poems have been published or forthcoming in print and online journals such as Pear Noir!, Room, Eclectica, Southern Humanities Review and many others. She is working on a full-length collection of poems on the interrelationship between perceptions of domesticity, foodways, class and gender in a post-Partition Bengali middle-class home. Born and raised in Kolkata, India, Nandini divides her time between Austin, Texas and Kolkata.

The two poems of Nandini Dhar have been published as pdfs to preserve the formatting. Given below are excerpts from the poems. Click on the titles to open the pdfs.

1. She Tastes Everything First

                                           "my grandfather likes to talk about my mother's love for us
                                                      she loves us so much that she tastes everything first
                                      My mother lifts a green papaya          holds it against the light
                                 by its stem     digs       her thumbnail      into the green of the skin
                             the milk oozing out         for a moment          this is a new beginning
                                                       like her nipple oozing milk        birth        only it is not"

2. Each One. Teach One

"Because that summer my mother wanted to believe
she could be a more effervescent version of herself: drawing lines on the ground,
plucking the sky that forever hung right outside her window,
she persuaded our maid, Kiran Pishi, to open her first bank account."