Mesbah Alam Arghya

Mesbah Alam Arghya (b. 1981) attended high school in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and moved to Ontario, Canada, to earn a degree in computer science and engineering. He began publishing poetry mainly in electronic media in the early 2000s, and was published later in the decade in various literary magazines in both Bangladesh and India. He is the author of three books of poetry; his first book of poems, Ami kAl RAte kothAo JAi nAi (I didn’t go anywhere last night), was published by Kaurab, India, in 2008. Arghya currently works at IBM’s software laboratory in Ottawa as a staff engineer.

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PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

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