How to Collect a Folk Tale

“I love the upward movement of Tashi’s poems where mountainscape merges into skyscape so smoothly, where mortals and immortals meet and merge with ease — stories that are told with a non-threatening masculinity that brings Sikkim home for me.”
– Easterine Kire

“It is Chophel’s wry, revelatory portraits that grip one’s attention. His exploration of his roots — by way of droll mythopoeia, a pointing up of cultural vanities where the local is refracted through migrant cultures — is accomplished. He keeps an ironic, but never supercilious, distance, and takes us to the heart of lives in this rewarding debut.”
– Robin S. Ngangom

“In Tashi Chophel’s poems one encounters a most interesting cast of characters. One, almost expectedly, breathes the mountain air. But it is these characters, with remarkable personal histories, that one remembers. So precise is Chophel’s way with words that we we even remember the person whose hair sticks to their teeth. I read it like one does a novel.”
– Sumana Roy