1 1

Belle Point Press

Cajun South Brown Folk

Cajun South Brown Folk

$25.00 CAD
$25.00 CAD
Sale Sold out

Cajun South Brown Folk, by Shome Dasgupta

In Shome Dasgupta’s latest poetry collection, generational threads weave rich Acadian and East Indian tapestries. Crossing cultures and continents, Cajun South Brown Folk sings across “espresso sunrises” and the “kindred of skin” shared beneath them. Dripping with memory and steeped in history and place, these formally diverse poems take heart in the strength that builds through a multitude of tongues and homes still ever rooted in the search for light and love through connections between Bengali and Cajun ways of life.

Shome Dasgupta is the author of The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), and most recently, the novels The Muu-Antiques (Malarkey Books) and Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West), a prose collection Histories Of Memories (Belle Point Press), a short story collection Atchafalaya Darling (Belle Point Press), and a poetry collection Iron Oxide (Assure Press). His writing has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, New Orleans Review, The Emerson Review, Jabberwock Review, American Book Review, Arkansas Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. He served as the the series editor for The Wigleaf Top 50 from 2019-2025. He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @shome_dasgupta.

Praise for Cajun South Brown Folk

"In Cajun South Brown Folk, Shome Dasgupta's well-crafted poems traverse East Indian culture via Louisiana’s Lafayette Cajun home base. These poems tell stories in Louisiana English interspersed with Bengali, or its endonym Bangla, a classical Indo-Aryan language from the Indo-European language family native to the West Bengal of India. Readers are at once transported from Cajun Lafayette life to Indian family ties, and the two cultures kiss us warmly in memorable verse. From a 'Cajun espresso sunrise' and crawfish seasons of Acadiana to khichuri, or rice and beans of Indian cuisine, thank you Shome Dasgupta, for this unique gift."
 
—Mona Lisa Saloy, author of Black Creole Chronicles, and Poet Laureate of Louisiana, 2021-2023

"When you read Shome Dasgupta's Cajun South Brown Folk, it feels like you’re watching two movies simultaneously, one recorded over the other but failing to erase the original in its entirety. Through Dasgupta’s 'cut and splice,' we are lulled into a cinematic game of comparison, one in which we are prompted to find the similarities between two places by sifting through their differences. We jump from Kolkata to Acadiana, from a Bengali kitchen to a Cajun one, from the speaker’s mother’s wrists to his own, and through these leaps we begin to see a cultural common denominator of deep love, both familial and communal. These are poems that know something about tenderness, that know that love is in the field, the kitchen, the food, the hand."

—Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times


Details:

    • Publication date: October 21, 2025
    • Trim size: 6 x 9 in
    • ISBN: 978-1-960215-47-5

Check out more Belle Point poetry here.

View full details