I read The Precious Ordinary slowly, the way you sip something warm when the day has been unkind. Not because the poems demanded caution, but because they kept asking me to pause. Midway through a page, I would stop—not to underline, not to analyse—but to notice the room I was sitting in, the quality of light, the way my own breath sounded. That, perhaps, is the first quiet transformation this book performs: it gently escorts you back into your own life.   Trishala Niranjana

I read The River Woman and Other Poems slowly, the way one reads something that does not want to be rushed. A few poems at night. One in the quiet between two tasks. Sometimes just a single page, because the lines had a way of lingering—like the aftersound of water moving past stones long after the river itself has slipped out of view.   Renu Roy’s poetry does not announce itself loudly. It arrives softly, almost tentatively, and then stays. This is a collection that lives in