সংস্করণ : 1st Published, 2026, ভাষা : ইংরেজি
An Alphabet of Bruises (Raiyaan Prokashon, September 2026) is a raw, unflinching collection that confronts sexual violence, systemic hypocrisy, forced marriage, colorism, loneliness, and the quiet erosion of the self. Written by a Bangladeshi male author, Shihab Ahmed Tuhin, it centers women’s experiences of assault and objectification across South Asia, the Middle East, the West, and institutional spaces (classrooms, workplaces, temples, police stations, factories), while also turning inward to male vulnerability, regret, and despair.
The book’s power lies in its refusal to look away.
The long title poem functions as a cumulative indictment: street harassment, familial betrayal, academic and corporate predation, deepfakes by would-be progressive law students, caste violence, migrant domestic worker abuse, child rape by trusted figures, and the collusion of silence. It moves between Dhaka streets, village cowsheds, Savar factories, Riyadh villas, Guantanamo, and Western feminist panels with a deliberate, almost forensic accumulation of detail. The effect is exhausting by design—the reader is made to feel the relentlessness of the “alphabet.”
Later poems shift registers. Some are tender or philosophical (When the World Pauses, Love Me in the Dark, Fluent in Silence). Others are polemical defenses of modesty or critiques of inheritance practices and child marriage. The closing pieces lean into personal desolation and the suspicion that one’s own nature is the problem. The voice is often more essayistic than purely lyrical; line breaks sometimes feel secondary to the argument or testimony.
The collection’s honesty is its chief strength and occasional liability. It does not sanitize male complicity, progressive hypocrisy, or the failures of community and family. It also does not pretend the author’s perspective is neutral; the empathy is hard-won and sometimes still filtered through a male gaze that catalogs bodily violation in detail.
Readers seeking polished lyric restraint or formal experiment will find less of that here. Readers seeking unvarnished social and emotional testimony will find a great deal.
