Benji Cole of CBS Radio interviews the author of the book “Navigating the Quartz Forest”, Biman Roy
The author of the amazing book “Navigating the Quartz Forest“, Biman Roy, was interviewed by Benji Cole of CBS Radio. They discuss the author’s inspiration and message when he wrote the book.
Biman Roy, a loving and sweet father to her daughter, wrote an inspiring book of poems that he dedicated to her. It is his way of expressing his love for her, as most fathers are known to be silent when expressing their love for their children.
Biman Roy has been writing poetry for more than thirty years and has been widely published. His writing has been selected for the “Best of the Net and Pushcart” awards. Biman Roy is the writer of one chapbook of exposition works, Of Moon and Washing Machine, and two other verse chapbooks, Dinosaur Hour and Navigating the Quartz Forest. He became a psychiatrist by calling and filling in as a specialist in a hospital in New York. He currently lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey.
The book is inspired by his teen daughter’s enigmatic pieces written on handwritten notes, and Biman Roy needed to compose a collection of poetry that imagined the universe of which he only saw tiny portions.
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.
Listen to the full interview: