Even as she was searching for people who had wanted to live like a tree, a quest recorded in her book How I Became a Tree, Sumana Roy was simultaneously writing poems to imagine the opposite: How might it feel for plants to live social lives as humans? In V.I.P, 'plant' replaces 'person' to become Very Important Plant. In this new cosmology, leaves and fruits and roots are seen as perhaps they have never been before - whether flowers can be repaired or trees have insurance policies; the invisible scaffolding of water in onion and the jackfruit as the Buddha's head, the papaya as Trojan horse and the 'war-veteran fine fuzz' of peaches, the 'shape of ceremony' of apples and the cosmopolitanism of the forest; how we want affection to be boneless and why the taste of light might be bitter; or whether God might be a vegetable...
Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree (2017), Missing: A Novel (2018), Out of Syllabus: Poems (2019), and My Mother's Lover and Other Stories (2019). She has edited Animalia Indica: The Finest Animal Stories in Modern Indian Literature (Aleph), and her poems, essays and stories have been published in Granta, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, LARB, The Common, The White Review, Catapult, Berfrois, The Journal of South Asian Studies, American Book Review, among other places. She is currently Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India. Her much acclaimed nonfiction book How I Became A Tree, published in India by Aleph in 2017, has been translated into French (Gallimard) and German (Matthes & Seitz). Shearsman Books publish her second collection of poems, V.I.P. (Very Important Plant), in May 2022.
