Hemant Divate writes of his world, of his everyday embedded-ment in it. A prisoner of his own reality, he is aware of his incarceration. Words are his sharpened spoons and knotted bed-sheets of possible escape, but instead they record his failures to do so, time after time. Each recourse in his product laden, consumerist mall-fantasies are additional scratches on his prison walls where he marks his days measured out in poetry. His situation in Mumbai — his Arthur Road, his Alcatraz in the twenty-first century allows him the use of every object at his disposal, every cultural signifier, every linguistic tic, just so long as he remains an inmate. Divate has always been conscious of his precedents. In his poetry and his writings, indeed in his choices as a publisher of new poetry he critiques the penchant for Marathi poets to rely on clichés and sentimentality, crutches he would say, that several poets have based their popularity on. In choosing to go beyond these tropes, he wanders into waters that are murky. Language has changed over the years, in this PoGo (post-globalised) world. Divate offers no leeway to those hanging on to the past. In both his themes and his voices, Divate roots himself in an authentic contemporary, allowing his translators neither distance nor objectivity, dragging them down with him, into the dirty city he inhabits. Inevitably, Moriarty and Holmes must both go over the Reichenbach Falls. It remains to be seen who emerges to tell the tale.  

                                   — Mustansir Dalvi, Man Without a Navel (Poetrywala), 2018.