Farmers of Blue Smoke
Farmers of Blue Smoke by Homraj Acharya is a collection of poems from three worlds the poet has lived in: the Nepali hill village where he first scratched verses into soil and wooden boards, the development work that took him across the country campaigning against caste discrimination, and the West where he now lives. The blue smoke of the title rises from the kitchens of people uprooted from land and belonging. Moving between village memory and city estrangement, folklore and capitalism, spirituality and the loneliness of technology, these poems are intimate, political and deeply humane.
Poetry as both witness and transformation, in the plain cadence of oral storytelling.
- Follow the farmers of blue smoke: migrant workers, diaspora families and all who are losing their footing in a globalised world.
- Confront caste and social hypocrisy in poems like Sex is Pure, Badi is Impure and Ganesh and the Rest of Us.
- Return to the textures of rural Nepal in The Kerosene Stove and The Life, Death and Reincarnation of the Jamun Tree.
- Read a voice that neither romanticises the village nor rejects the city, but holds the contradictions of both.
- Discover a significant new contribution to Nepali and South Asian literature in English.
Written by a social activist who has walked across Nepal against caste-based discrimination, the collection lets activism rise through image and metaphor rather than argument. The poet's note recalls writing before notebooks were available, and reflects on how Nepali feels grounded while English feels abstract, a tension that shapes the whole book.
Critic Dr. Sanjeev Upreti calls it poetry that is “both intimate and questioning”, drawing on memory, myth, labour and everyday life to show the connections between people, nature and power.
