By Onkar Sharma

Wild Winds, brought out by Hawakal Publishers with cover art by Bitan Chakraborty, is the second hard-copy harvest from Borderless, the online journal Mitali Chakravarty has edited since 2020 into one of the more quietly ambitious homes for contemporary verse in translation and English. Drawing together some two dozen poets — from a Walt Whitman Award winner to first-time contributors, immigrants, working mothers and retirees — the anthology inherits both the journal’s greatest strength and its central challenge: a genuinely international, genre-agnostic sensibility, assembled not around a school or a manifesto but around the editor’s own taste and her stated ambition of a world imagined without borders.

That range declares itself early. Isa Kamari’s “The King,” translated from the Malay by the poet himself, opens on a note of ceremonial address — “I bow to you, King” — and carries real historical weight in its short, supplicant lines. Asad Latif’s contributions sit at the collection’s political and emotional centre: “An India Like You” stages a dialogue between nation and daughter, Alma insisting “I’m as Indian as you, India,” while “A Toy for You” turns a blank map into a father’s gift, its closing bilingual couplet — “Do bigha zameen. Ek mutthi asmaan” — folding Hindi, Sanskrit and Arabic register into a single tender address.

Elsewhere the tone turns plainer and more domestic. Ashok Suri’s farmer declares, simply, that he has “set right thousand wrongs” by staying at his plough, and his sparrow-watcher notes the bird flapping “without any worry or bother” once the rain relents. Jim Murdoch’s “Simpatico” compresses an entire marriage into the confession that finishing his wife’s sentences correctly “every ten or twelve goes” counts, for him, “a win.” George Freek’s cat-envying speaker and Kiriti Sengupta’s “Christ Consciousness” — which borrows its epigraph from Tagore before answering, simply, “God” — both use small, almost offhand anecdotes to open onto mortality. John Swain’s “The Canopy Palm,” where “the sky fallows mosaic pastures / at the height of the ciphering earth,” is pure image-work, a useful counterweight to the book’s more conversational register.

Advance notice of the anthology — including a blurb from Aruna Chakravarti praising its “simple rhythms” and “haunting complexity,” and Borderless‘s own framing of it as a work “mapping varied continents” — has rightly stressed this diversity as the book’s selling point rather than apologised for it. That is a fair reading: readers move between a farmer’s stoicism, a translated king’s lament, a marital in-joke and a hallucinatory palm canopy without any house style being imposed on the contributors, a real editorial achievement given how many hands and languages are involved.

The trade-off is unevenness of finish. Poems by Latif, Kamari and Sengupta reward rereading for compression and precision; a few others read closer to journal-entry sincerity than fully worked craft, and a stricter edit might have tightened the book without shrinking its ambitions. Readers seeking a single aesthetic should look elsewhere; those drawn to poetry as a record of many simultaneous, unrelated ways of being alive will find Wild Winds a generous and often moving gathering, true to the borderless spirit its parent journal takes as its name.