Saswat Mishra’s poetry collection “The Cat, The Fish, The Poet and You” emerges as a compelling testament to contemporary alienation, presented through the lens of a poet who refuses to sanitize his experience for palatability. This collection of twenty poems offers readers an unfiltered glimpse into the psyche of someone grappling with isolation, paranoia, creative struggle, and the search for authentic connection in an increasingly disconnected world.
The collection’s title poem serves as both manifesto and invitation, establishing Mishra’s relationship with his subjects—cats, fish, poets, and readers—through metaphors that explore predator-prey dynamics and the blurred boundaries between creator and audience. The poet’s admission that he writes with “nine” brains “like a ninetailed fox” immediately signals his comfort with contradiction and multiplicity, themes that permeate the entire work.
Thematic Architecture: Building Meaning from Fragments
The Isolation Paradox
Mishra’s treatment of solitude reveals a fascinating paradox: while the speaker often expresses loneliness and alienation, he simultaneously discovers “joy in solitude” and describes himself as a “Cocoon.” This duality runs throughout the collection, particularly evident in poems like “Yet” where the speaker contrasts himself with the mythological Yudhishthira, claiming he was “never that thirsty” yet finding himself living “in the ode” of solitude nonetheless.
The poem “Language Learning, Longing and Lamenting” exemplifies this tension beautifully. Here, the speaker, an English literature graduate teaching “boring Communicative English,” ascends to his rooftop with a Spanish language book, dreaming of writing “the next Despacito or One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The irony is palpable—a man who teaches communication yet describes himself as a loner, studying a foreign language while feeling alienated in his own linguistic space.
Creative Struggle and Artistic Identity
One of the collection’s strongest themes emerges in Mishra’s exploration of the creative process itself. “On My Inability To Sounding Sad” presents a poet who cannot write melancholic verse despite experiencing deep melancholy, because “the writer in me is unhealthily and irrevocably pinned to eternal joy.” This split between the experiencing self and the creating self offers profound insight into the artistic temperament.
“Jarhead Poet” develops this theme further through a conversation with an advocate’s son who criticizes the speaker’s poetry as “rubbish” and “stagnant.” The poet’s response—that poetry “must be jarring and jarring only”—becomes a defense of difficult art in an age that demands easy consumption. His explanation that his poems are jarring because he was “good as a child” but became “bad as an adult” reveals a theory of art as compensation for lived inadequacy.
Paranoia and Social Commentary
The collection’s most unsettling and powerful piece, “I Am Just They To Them,” presents a narrative of systematic harassment and persecution that reads like a modern-day Kafkaesque nightmare. Whether interpreted as literal experience or metaphorical representation, this poem captures the alienation of contemporary life with visceral intensity. The speaker describes being surrounded by “hundreds” of people who monitor his every move, influence service providers against him, and even attempt to poison his food.
This paranoid vision extends beyond personal experience to become social commentary on surveillance culture, mob mentality, and the fragility of individual agency in mass society. The repetition of “they” creates a faceless, omnipresent antagonist that could represent anything from social media algorithms to political oppression to internalized anxiety.
Stylistic Innovations and Technical Craft
Language and Voice
Mishra’s poetic voice combines colloquial directness with literary sophistication in ways that feel authentic rather than affected. His ability to move seamlessly from lines like “What an irony / What paradox at play / What anagnorisis / And what peripeteia” to “Ya / I’m an Indian” demonstrates remarkable tonal range and cultural fluency.
The poet’s self-conscious use of literary references—from Shakespeare’s Jacques to Nostradamus to Gabriel García Márquez—never feels pretentious because it’s balanced by genuine vulnerability and humor. When he writes about wanting to own a bookshop as a child, or describes dancing with his nephew to Punjabi music, these moments ground the more abstract philosophical passages in lived experience.
Structural Choices
The collection’s organization follows an emotional and thematic arc rather than strict chronological or formal patterns. Early poems establish the speaker’s artistic philosophy and personal circumstances, while later pieces delve deeper into psychological territory and spiritual questioning. “If,” positioned near the collection’s end, imagines a casual conversation with God that reveals the speaker’s fundamental humanism and rejection of traditional religious hierarchy.
The final poem, “Three Smiles,” provides a gentle counterpoint to the collection’s darker themes, ending with the speaker’s simple pleasure in receiving attention from three women while wearing a new shirt his mother bought him. This conclusion suggests hope and human connection despite the alienation explored throughout the work.
Cultural Context and Literary Positioning
Indian English Poetry Tradition
Mishra’s work participates in the rich tradition of Indian English poetry while maintaining a distinctly personal voice. His references to colonial education, polyglotism as a “curse” of being Indian, and the tension between regional and national identity place him squarely within contemporary Indian literary discourse. However, his treatment of these themes avoids both nationalist posturing and postcolonial clichés.
The poem “Ode To Black Pagoda” demonstrates Mishra’s ability to engage with Indian cultural heritage critically and originally. His meditation on the Konark Sun Temple weaves together historical commentary, artistic appreciation, and social critique in ways that honor the monument while acknowledging the human cost of its creation.
Contemporary Relevance
Several poems in “The Cat, The Fish, The Poet And You” feel particularly relevant to current global conversations about mental health, surveillance, and social media. “The Sold-out God” presents a cynical view of institutional corruption that could apply to numerous contemporary contexts, while the paranoid scenarios in “I Am Just They To Them” echo concerns about privacy and digital monitoring that have become increasingly mainstream.
Recommended Reading
Readers who appreciate Mishra’s blend of personal vulnerability, social critique, and formal innovation might enjoy several contemporary poets working in similar veins. Arun Kolatkar’s “Jejuri” offers another example of Indian English poetry that combines cultural specificity with universal themes. For international comparisons, the confessional directness of poets like Sharon Olds or the paranoid urban landscapes of Frederick Seidel provide interesting parallels.
Within the contemporary Indian English poetry scene, works by Jeet Thayil, Sampurna Chattarji, and Vivek Narayanan share Mishra’s interest in urban alienation and psychological complexity, though each develops these themes in distinctly different directions.
Final Assessment
“The Cat, The Fish, The Poet and You” succeeds as both personal document and artistic achievement. Mishra has created a collection that risks genuine vulnerability while maintaining the craft and intelligence necessary to transform private experience into meaningful art. His willingness to explore difficult psychological territory—paranoia, creative inadequacy, social alienation—without offering easy resolution or false comfort marks him as a poet of considerable courage and insight.
The collection’s greatest strength lies in its refusal to separate the personal from the political, the psychological from the social. Mishra understands that individual suffering often reflects broader systemic problems, and his poetry provides a lens through which readers can examine their own experiences of alienation and connection in contemporary life.
This is poetry that demands attention not through dramatic gestures but through sustained honesty and technical competence. Mishra has produced a debut collection that establishes him as a significant new voice in Indian English poetry, one capable of speaking to both local and global audiences about the complexities of modern existence.
