Author Description

Product Description Senryu, the often neglected cousin of Haiku, is a Japanese form of short poetry similar to Haiku in construction but focusing on human emotions and psychology of the human mind. Consider it as human emotions served in a bite-sized nugget. In this book, I have penned down 8 Senryus for each of 8 fundamental human emotions. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did writing them. Review "Evocative and profound, the poems carry a wide range of bare emotions, their simplicity making them immensely relatable. " --Tuhin A Sinha "Young couples, dead mothers, children, lady in mental asylum, bosses... through these everyday characters, Tanuj captures myriad shades of human emotions in his first collection of haikus, making this Japanese form of poetry very much his own." --(Zafar Anjum) a Singapore-based writer, publisher and filmmaker. 8 x 8 is an interesting collection in form, through its choice of the much-less deployed senryu, over standard haiku; in its decision to organise the book around eight sets of poems each exploring a named emotion; and in the selection of the emotions themselves: are nostalgia and surprise, the bookend sections, emotions in the same way love, sadness and anger clearly are? Why are all but two of the emotions negative? Should the reader make much or little of the order in which they are addressed? In the end, these questions are perhaps less important than the poems themselves, which in their clean simplicity and unusual subject matter arrest the attention on every page. In a short preface, the poet notes that Senryu, the often neglected cousin of Haiku, is a Japanese form of short poetry similar to Haiku in construction but focusing on human emotions and the psychology of the human mind, a neat summary allowing him to roam across a broad thematic space commonly denied to the pure haikuist, straining to objectively explore the haiku moment in nature, with no w