Available in India: https://store.pothi.com/book/sushant-thapa-walking-rebel-micropoems-and-poems/

Enough of the bore academic voice and let’s get into business with Sushant Thapa’s The Walking Rebel. The easy-to read poetry book on your shelf is the one that beats up the fear of feeling punched, a really sensitive word comes and has a short sit down. It boasts those miniscule poems — blink-and-you-miss-it — as well as the somewhat lengthy, coloured stuff. In a sense, this is a soul mixtape.

Thapa doesn’t beat about the bush, but hits at the bull’s eye with the very first stroke of his pen:

I would carry your emotions,

would you read my art?

See. He sort of throws an aeon of sorts between him and the reader. The purpose is not only to write words at you, but to also make you understand exactly what he has to lug around every single day. It comes across as personal, but not in the sense of “let me just talk about myself”. And now, he is making it your problem as well.

Then there is this skin that:

…separates you and me

 This presence is a void.

Gosh! He is saying that they could be right there next to them but you will be orbiting galaxies. Minimal words, maximum gut blow.

Many pages of the book are devoted to head versus heart. A poem begins:

Intellectuality is my error

if used to mend the truth.

Basically—stop over thinking everything. So better to leave or do not think too much. Thapa is also calling out even the fake deep types:

If you act falsely

it is an irony—

acting is only first degree mimesis;

when it is false, there is no mimesis.

Once you are faking it to this degree, what little performing you were doing has now ground to a complete halt. Only it is empty, a fake bag with hole in the corner.

The stuff about success? That grind set is not for him.

If success is a rose

I wander aimlessly in the garden

for all seasons,

drawn close to the reasons I live.

He is not looking for gold stars, per se — he is just walking the streets of his life and picking up whatever rings true to him. That is a sort of liberation. He writes:

Now that I can touch my sadness

and life is a journey of expression,

happiness is only an invention!

The journey is my poetry

In other words, he no longer tries to escape unhappiness. Poking, prodding moulding you into this position. Certainly the theme is to fix this loss but that includes a certain hopelessness as well.

When I lost my home,

I started seeking the world

He is not all boxed up, he is sightseeing and gallivanting. No grand bifurcation of stale before-and-after, just the ghost-a trick of shadows sliding through ajar wood, the cocooned self forgotten long behind in the battered box, refusing to unshelve from this drawer.

He also suggests a few things about time and memory:

Every page deserves to be turned

before the book of life ends.

So never skip chapters, and fast forward to the end, enjoy the in between. That part is the best anyways! But then he hits us with these:

And when words make love

a Poet is born.

I mean, come on. This is poetry about poetry and the weight of it, the godliness of it and how human poetry is. Thapa is not some man-baby here to hand hold you all the way there. He is out here making you all squirmy, feeling feelings and maybe — if you are real lucky — making you see yourself in the mess.

But when the speaker of these poems is all bound up in his own hypocrisy and wearing that shit like it is some big badge. As in:

I am a bizarre coherence,

I seek help

in enmity.

Is this the cup of loneliness?

Weird, huh? This is what actually is called in an awkward manner. And the entire bizarre coherence thing is just so perfectly imperfect way (Many apologies for that). Looking for help in enemies? That’s some next-level soul searching. It is almost like the kind of one can spiritually sip down loneliness.

Then again with vehemence:

Memories are the trust

that seek the warmth.

Memories have to be back there, working the room like puppies around a heater rather than merely sitting in some cranny, off in a dusty photo album somewhere.

There are reminders of nature all along the way. But it is as tender as

a dewdrop memory

that will make my feet wet

in the morning glory

of winter.

This all sounds very Zen and lovely but it is fleeting — you blink and like dew it evaporates. This place is delicate even in its glory. And suddenly—bam, existential horror:

The graveyard isn’t a home

but it is the winter of heart

I am afraid of.

Graveyards, winter, fear—yeah, that hits. Nor was the graveyard lovable, but it is in a-way like the frost on this ground.

And this line just totally… floors the reader:

This poem is like a handkerchief

you forgot to carry,

but you always needed.

I mean, who among us hasn’t been stranded with snot for a life on occasion? Poetry here is not an optional-extra — it’s some of the best emotional first aid. You do not have to realise this when you are lying on the ground in tears,

Dead weight, yes, but grieving on the base:

Sorrow is a river;

it drowns you

unless you learn to swim

These are not just words either — it bites; Leap up into the present, or be crushed out of existence. The poetry lesson is the swimming one.

Nor is Thapa afraid to shatter:

Life is made of fragments

to sit and relax,

the knife cannot cut the mind.

Fragments?Often fragments are the concept of pause. Resting the head on a knife, and the knife not cutting cerebellum. And then, out of nowhere, you will read something like —

My dream is a memory

of long kissed sunsets

when the day bade its goodbye

I bet you just did that deep breath and looked outside your window, huh? Even endings are kind of beautiful.

So it comes full circle to art as wellbeing:

Poetry rains

like honey,

music tames

the bleeding heart.

Music is an opiate when days are all potions, And poetry the balm, honey-like medicinal. Medicine, not decoration.

In The Walking Rebel, Sushant Thapa is soft but stubborn, He is not angry at the universe — he simply can no longer pretend. All of the pieces are emotional snapshots, some just a moment long and others stretching on like a season. Kind of philosophical, but actually quite literal. Somewhere where grief and joy don’t have to be sugar coated but can just be messy and even complicated, yet weirdly beautiful. Each poem is a turn of the page, so much so that if you wanted to know what happened next then you simply had to keep reading it all. I feel like there are some books of poetry that begin and end but reading The Walking Rebel feels more akin to slipping out from someone else’s head a little dazed. Thapa is not trying to impress you. He wants your raw, real feelings. It’s not fancy poetry trying to be too poetic—it’s poetry speaking up. I had this experience too. And just maybe, if you have a poem of your own hidden in a forgotten journal you’ll realize that the process of recovery is not always glam, but it can be honest.

Bio of the Reviewer: Wani Nazir is a postgraduate gold medalist from the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, J&K. Presently working as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education, he is an author of two poetic collections, “And the Silence Whispered” & “The Chill in the Bones”.