Finalist for Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize
Finalist for Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry
“Kashyap’s poems bear witness to the enduring effects of living under protracted state violence. He draws on a range of first-person narrators, from victims and survivors to insurgents and soldiers, to express how violence ripples across generations, and shapes both the oppressor and the oppressed. Crucially, oppressor and oppressed are not mutually exclusive categories: even as his narrators highlight state coercion, they emphasize the ethnic insurgency’s xenophobia towards migrants. ”
THERE IS NO GOOD TIME FOR BAD NEWS opens in a country ravaged by prolonged political conflict. Told in the voices of survivors, it introduces the reader to a wide array of characters: the local police precinct summons a woman after three decades to identify the body of her insurgent son among recovered dead bodies; a soldier lives through nightmares about the war he fought forty years ago; a woman writes a letter to her insurgent lover; and an ordinary citizen, through an open letter, challenges the child-killing insurgents to kill her. At once vignettes and urgent pleas, these are stories as much as they are poems. Zooming through wars, protest marches, and conflicts, they show what it means to live under the duress of prolonged violence.
Media Coverage
There is No Good Time for Bad News: Poetry Speaks Resistance, with Aruni Kashyap
Poetry Atlanta Presents Andrea Jurjević, Aruni Kashyap, and Tiana Nobile
“Unflinching ...Kashyap also uses testimonio in his poetry to tell silenced tales of state repression as an act of political resistance. In the absence of formal justice, his poems bear witness to violations of human rights and represent the silenced voice of subaltern subjects. There is No Good Time for Bad News reminds us of the long-overdue reckoning with trauma and violence that haunts India’s post-colonial future.”
“Reminding us that to turn your eyes away from suffering is to turn away from compassion, Aruni Kashyap wrote his unflinching collection of poems about insurgency within Assam. Every poem feels like an act of trust and necessity without the guarantee of finality to the emotional upheaval they convey. Kashyap gives voice to a previously unheard pain, demonstrating how poets redeem us when recorded or reported history fails.”
“In a climate of planetary crises and collapses of democracy, Aruni Kashyap’s There is No Good Time for Bad News talks about renewed prospects and survival after violence. The book offers an arrangement of unordinary events, about lives who find a way against state-triggered duress, and recreate history through their survival. ”
“[…] interrogates the condition of living through and resisting the violence of the state. I fell in love with his newest collection because it folds testimony into poetry.”
“The beauty of Kashyap’s poems is that his intellectual positions never overpower the emotions experienced by the people in his poems. The emotions themselves carry the poems, whether they are of overpowering grief, deep-seated trauma, or fear of bomb blasts. Kashyap doesn’t explain the context too much, which is great for fostering imagination in the reader. He retains local, regional, or national references (I am secretly hoping his American readers find and watch the movie, Maine Pyar Kiya!). Do read this book if you are artistically or politically invested in peace missions, conflict zones, state control, border, and integration issues.”
“There Is No Good Time for Bad News is an unforgettable collection that bears witness to the state-sponsored violence in Assam. Each poem in this book reads like a short story, a personal story, in fact, of people whose grief-stricken existence and loss of personal agency is a result of neglect, violence, and dehumanisation.”
