The New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) features “Navigating the Quartz Forest” by Biman Roy
Biman Roy’s emotive yet discerning read, “Navigating the Quartz Forest,” was featured in the November issue of The New York Times Book Review.
Current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed in The New York Times Book Review (NYTBR), a weekly paper magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of The New York Times (an American daily newspaper with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to be a growing 6 million paid digital subscribers). It is one of the most well-known and significant book reviews in the business.
Biman Roy has been writing poetry for the past three decades and has been widely published. His work has received nominations for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Biman Roy is the author of one chapbook of prose poems, Of Moon and Washing Machine, and two other poetry chapbooks, Dinosaur Hour and this masterpiece Navigating the Quartz Forest.
Each dreamlike lyric in Biman Roy’s Navigating the Quartz Forest is charmingly paired with a small handwritten note hastily jotted down on blue-lined notebook paper—artifacts from his daughter’s life outside the family home.
“All through the evening, we keep talking nonessentials, / tiptoeing around secret tulips,” he says. These notes, like scraps of overheard conversations removed from their natural habitats, become the crystalline seeds of new poems.
Side-by-side with each other, the poems act as translators for these somewhat oracular messages from an unknown world of teenage gossip and pop culture references, fitting the pieces together like a shattered mirror and filling in the jagged-edged gaps with the poet’s expansive imagination.
In Navigating the Quartz Forest, Roy’s whimsical poems become a sparkling tribute from a father to his beloved daughter.
Readers may purchase “Navigating the Quartz Forest” by Biman Roy via these links: