The Dust Draws Its Face on the Wind

Avinash Shrestha is one of the most important contemporary poets writing in Nepali today. Born in India to Nepali immigrants, he migrated to Kathmandu in 1984 from Assam to pursue graduate studies.

His first book of poetry, published in 1990, created a stir in the poetry scene inKathmandu. He brought a distinctly Sanskrit-heavy idiom – that also drew from theAssamese, Urdu, Hindi and Bengali poetry of India – into Nepali poetry which was, at the time, mired in social and moral themes. This new poetry was necessarily syncretic, and surrealist by design. Shrestha’s later work intersects his distinct idiom with themes of climate justice, mourning the ecological degradation in the Eastern Himalayas.

This selection from his four books of poetry, as well as some of his new uncollected poems – all translated brilliantly by the award-winning poet Rohan Chhetri – is the first serious book of translation of any contemporary Nepali poetry into English.