Tushar Jain is an Indian poet and writer.He was the winner of the 2012 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize, 2013 Poetry with Prakriti Prize, 2014 RL Poetry Award, 2014 DWL Short Story Contest, 2016 Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing and has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize.
His work is published (or is forthcoming) in various literary magazines and journals such as Aaduna, Papercuts, The Nervous Breakdown, Antiserious, Raed Leaf India, The Young Ravens Review, The Madras Mag, Cold Noon, Streetcake Magazine, The Sierra Nevada Review, Into the Void Magazine, The Cape Rock Journal, Miracle, Dryland Magazine, The Bookends Review, Edify Fiction, Gramma, decomP Magazine, Priestess & Hierophant Magazine, Barking Sycamores, Literary Heist, The Wax Paper, The Wagon and others.
His work has also been anthologised in several publications, including the forthcoming landmark anthology by Sahitya Akademi, 'Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians'.
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► Tushar's microchap & selected poems are available below.
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Origami Microchap |
Selected Poem(s) |
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| Clowns in Love | |||
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Cover collage by Jan Keough -
Every microchap
may be downloaded for free
from this website.
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Clowns in Love hiding from the circus-master
and his angry, braided whip, and peering over the sea-lions jumping through hoops dripping with fire, the clowns fell in love at sundown, under a crimson
moon, lit in the day’s receding sounds, the clowns met and talked behind the tent of the Galician leper, who could ground a record between his teeth, and belch out music, like a turntable over the month, they met secretly,
at times, in the iguana dens, or the deserted buggy of the bearded woman, and at times, made love amid a litter of sleeping cats who had been trained to moan, the scores of an operetta then, one rainy day, when the
stern-backed circus-master noticed that the clowns had eloped to the hills on his pristine Persian rug, he, livid, wrung apart his leather whip, and burst into a flight of swallows, that dissolved in the rain since then, every year, when
●autumn razes the colour from the mango leaves, and drains the hibiscus near the shore, the clouds, scudding like water over the red hills, the glades, the clearings seared in the forest, bring in wisps of a clown’s laughter, holding its breath, held deep under love Tushar Jain © 2018
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Reading Kafka in Wintertime he looked deep into
the book, felt its thick plumage beneath his fingers, looked up, and knew sufferingly what came next the sofa had spread
out, sprung legs, and hobbled back and forth, shambling around the room, walking into things, like a doddering old man rummaging for food in the dark the lamp in the
corner shuddered, grew wings, moulting feathers on the floor; it pecked at his hair and from an open window, leapt out, a glowing cicada in the night the table before
him sneezed, then, shrugged the coffee off its back, and crab-like, sidled up the wall, and hung upside down from the rafters, a dark, awkward bat, gazing down at him with piercing, azure eyes the ottoman rolled
over on its short squirming legs, scratched its belly, gnashed a gnat between its teeth, and then, pounced on the kitchen board, and chased a mewling toaster into the December cold the wines marched out
the cellar and barrelled to assembly, and with a heron's cry, the Chteau Petrus took the banister, and tinkling a spoon against its bleached labels, mauve texture, it led the Bordeaux, the Merlot and the Claret looking up, into Beethoven’s fifth, and their squeals rent the air at the Petrus’s every stroke, - a grating, uneven cackle, masquerading as Baroque Tushar Jain © 2018
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