Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Clamour for a Handful of Rice is a 2025 poetry collection by Sonnet Mondal that explores themes of hunger, survival, conflict, and the human condition. The book uses powerful imagery to address social issues, including poverty, war, and indifference, and is described as a collection that confronts harsh realities and demands that readers look beyond comfort zones.
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American poet Lois P. Jones, author of Night Ladder, shares her review of Mondal’s work below.
Sonnet Mondal’s Clamour for a Handful of Rice reaches behind the eyes of the body of hunger to examine what drives our deeper selves. This is no lofty observational tower but a poet who bears witness and reflects, whether in the mirror or through testament of the city’s poor who, with empty stomachs and begging hands/….still smile near car windows.
Mondal’s book challenges our sense of awareness, negotiating the ways we cope with the suffering of others through action or the consequences of inaction. What do we hunger for and how is it sated?
The earth shakes every day.
Cries fill the air more than ever.
You were content with the earth supporting your legs
bees humming to the flowers nearby
and you drifted on the flowing honey.
You lost your voice with bread inside your mouth
and the passing time faded away
with the rhythm of your chewing.
From The Way Time Turned Dark
Mondal’s Clamour reaches beyond the metaphor of food to humanity’s hunger for war and greed, and its observational contrasts of the haves and have-nots. Teenagers at the bazaar help their parents/sell meat, fish, and vegetables while watching the faces of school-bound children. These are hard realities consumed through the acute understanding of a world that grapples daily with inequities.
The tree it sits on doesn’t drink water.
It is captive and forced to drink the blood
of the people lying lifeless in her shadow.
Her shade couldn’t console them when they were alive.
Her leaves couldn’t bandage the war
and the ash around couldn’t blind the hate.
From Somewhere on a Tree
Mondal is fierce in the quality of his attention to the world and the larger philosophical questions that hold gravitas, and yet, a tenderness for what keeps us alive.