Just One Thing with Amrita Chakraborty

We’re not surprised Chen Chen picked Amrita Chakraborty’s poem “Seema Asks Me When I First Learned I Was a Girl and I Don’t Know How to Tell Her” as first runner-up in our poetry contest this year; the imagery is simultaneously dreamy and gut-punch strong, grounded and ethereal. Here’s just one thing from Amrita about her poem:

“One of my sharpest childhood memories is a trip my family and I took to a West Virginian community called New Vrindavan when I was eight. An attempt at reconstructing the Indian city of Vrindavan, legendary birthplace of the Hindu god Krishna, it's a scenic, wooded area dotted with elaborate temples and religious iconography. For a kid who hadn't spent much time in Bangladesh, my family's motherland, this presented as a curiously liminal space, the Appalachian landscape providing a strange yet fitting backdrop for the recreated landmarks of a city I had never seen. From wandering around the enormous rose garden to having an encounter with a surprisingly friendly doe that shows up in this poem, the images from that trip remain with me in warm, sensory detail.  Now that I have firmer ideas of my own faith and heritage, as well as more knowledge of the organization that created this place, I wonder what New Vrindavan would look like to me today. ”