“Khiwani is a polymath who infuses his lyric reflections with painters, philosophers, poets and photographers; with Greek mythology, French dramaturgy, German phraseology, Bombay’s profane and holy urban landscape; with longing and love and anguish and immaculate craftsmanship . . . Whatever else art may be, Khiwani writes, it is ‘a dark condemned space with the door unlocked,’ where we wander in unsure of what we want and sometimes never finding what we need. On other occasions, however, as when we read Khiwani’s virtuouso posthumous collection De Kooning’s Smile, we find exactly what we need, even if it’s not something we particularly realized we wanted; and instead of being condemned by the encounter, we give ourselves ‘up into the brightness’ and emerge entirely, irrevocably redeemed.”
Ravi Shankar, Pushcart-prize winning author and poet 
 
“The intimate, revealing later poems underline our loss: Deepankar Khiwani left us just as he’d come into his indivisible own. This book represents all the poems he wished to keep—and it is invaluable. I am under its sway.”
Jeet Thayil
 
“At once lyrical and intellectual, reflecting the present and the past, Deepankar Khiwani’s poems speak to us in an original and wide-ranging voice unusual in Indian poetry in English. Many of these poems reveal themselves differently after successive readings and contain arresting and enduring images such as: ‘the radio . . . / pitched to the frequency of a static bewilderment.’ It is also a poetry of place with Bombay coming alive and turning vibrant in ‘Bombay Sequence’. Not just restricted to Bombay, this is a cosmopolitan poetry, that reflects his own life: ‘. . . with a father from Pakistan, and a mother from Bangladesh, / growing up in Bombay, married to a Jat woman.’ The strict formalism (rare in Indian poetry in English) of much of Deepankar’s poetry comes through strikingly in poems like ‘Two Photographs’, ‘Photograph at the Lodi Gardens’, ‘Delhi Airport’, ‘Business Lunch’, ‘Poet Shaving’ and ‘Homeward Bound’; and in this prophetic image: ’Art provides closure / while, of course, it doesn’t; Art, whatever it is / is a dark condemned space with the door unlocked’. Deepankar’s own art is, however, unlocked into light and colour in this wonderfully produced book.”
Manohar Shetty