'The Maker of Garlands is Pooja Mittal Biswas’s fifth collection of poetry. An Indian-Australian born in Nigeria and raised all over the world, Biswas has long grappled with issues of identity and belonging, culminating in a complex, hybrid, multihued series of experiences woven by Biswas into the ‘garland’ that is her latest book. In Hinduism, garlands are often reserved for gods or for those who are celebrated and respected; Biswas, an errant Hindu still deeply passionate about her origins, here assembles a garland of abject humanity and otherness, celebrating instead those who are without power. In The Maker of Garlands, creation and destruction are inextricably bound, inseparable as they are in the continual, metaphysical process of rebirth, here metaphorised by the cultural, sexual and psychological rebirths experienced by the author through the joint displacements of immigration, colonialism, madness and racial, religious and intimate violence. Biswas explores ‘the slow intimacy of murders’ that is finding belonging at the cost of authenticity, be it through overtly enforced or more subtly hegemonic forms of cultural assimilation, conformity and the policing or commodification of gender and sexuality—the constant battle to retain, recover and reassert one’s humanity in the face of pressure, prejudice and privilege. The intersectional stigmatisation of certain embodiments or representations of race, ethnicity, sex, mental illness and socioeconomic status in Australia result in the poet necessarily having to speak from the sidelines, looking from the outside in, though she also finds, in inhabiting the liminal, a precarious stability in that relatively unchanging alienation. Australian identity is explored in this book as being perpetually precarious for those who are deemed non-normative, or those who come upon that identity from the outside, constantly having to contend that they, too, are an integral part of the Australian narrative and of the Australian voice. Raw, fearless and confronting, Biswas offers a ferociously uncensored exploration of the personal and cultural, yet there are gleaming, pearlesque moments of togetherness, of healing, of finding that not all of one’s identities have been torn out at the roots, and that there still remain possibilities for renewal and rediscovery.' (Publication summary)
