The last time we got in touch with Prachi Prangya Agasti, we spoke about her fourth novel Dance With Me, a romance story. And this time, she is foraying into new territory and has come up with her fifth book which is full of poems. "I had started writing with poems, so this feels good," says the 23-year-old, who also feels like she has come a full circle. But writing poetry is slightly more difficult than writing prose, she admits. She did test a few of her poems in fests like Kochi International Book Festival. "Everyone was expecting me to read a short story, but I read out a poem. They really appreciated the poem," says Agasti and from that moment onwards, she knew that she is headed in the right direction. But it was during her previous book launches and other literary fests that she met the poet and author Dilip Mohapatra and felt even more encouraged to pen poetry again.
Hence, the 23-year-old wrote Empty Roads and Broken Words, her first book with a collection of 46 medium-length poems. The book was published last month and has been available on Amazon for the last two weeks. "I tried to portray different emotions through my poems," says Agasti. So one can find poems on a diverse range of topics, right from heartbreaks to refugees. She went through various blogs and poems to write this book. Her first draft was "messed up", but the consequential drafts became better and better. "Readers can expect a different side of me from this book," says Agasti, who is working in Vedanta Limited, Lanjigarh. And as far as her next book goes, she is working on a novel which will fall under the genre of fantasy. Meanwhile, she asks us to look out for the short write-ups she keeps posting on her Instagram page.
One of Agasti's poems, Mid-Summer Dream
Moving like a poem
Escape into the summer nights
Watching over the dusty moonlight
Breath-taking and enticing
With silky wings and a light beam
You feel divine todepth of your soul
Devouring the fairy dust
Of purple pixies
Stumbling into the drifting melodies
While I quietly wander into my midsummer dream
For more on her, click on instagram.com/echoes_n_
