Rishi Dastidar’s poetry has appeared in publications such as the Financial Times, New Scientist, and the BBC as well as Tate Modern and the Southbank Centre, among many others, while also featuring in acclaimed anthologies like Adventures in Form (Penned in Margins, 2012) and Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014). As an active member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, Rishi, co-edited Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different (Corsair, 2021), and is dedicated towards nurturing young, bold voices in the UK. He also serves as chair of Spread the Word, a writer development agency committed to supporting under-represented writers, and is a fellow of The Complete Works, an Arts Council England-funded initiative dedicated to the advancement of BAME poets in the UK. Rishi’s vital presence in the UK poetry landscape, particularly as an advocate for brown voices that have historically been side-lined, contributes to the multicultural fabric of London’s literary scene, and reflected in his poems that challenge socio-cultural and racial exclusions.  

Dastidar has admitted he has a soft spot for ‘list poetry’, employed in his long form work Saffron Jack, loosely updating Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King in a form that looks more like a technical report. In an interview with Ben Yeoh for Then Do Better podcast, Rishi says “if you think of a fundamental level, what the poets do, we're observers as much as we're anything else. So poems are bluntly lists of images, lists of sensations, lists of memories that we've re-found, re-contextualized, reasserted.”  

Dastidar’s first poetry collection Ticker Tape was labelled as ‘an effervescent debut that showcases a writer who combines breath of imagination with comic chops.’ The poems are “a maximalist take on 21st century living” and exemplifies contemporary life in Britain. From matters of national identity to deconstructed banter, and sharks that come to dinner, poems in this collection use exaggerated allusions and name drop dates and figures from history to make personal intimate observations and cerebral concerns. ‘Licking Stamp’ utilises the form of a courtship love poem to, and evokes romantic themes, through military symbolism, or what he terms through self-referentiality, “the martial metaphor.” He compares an “oil spill” to “having sex” and juxtaposes geopolitical topicality to with personal politics. Author R.A Villanueva terms this as a collection of “form-defying poems”, where the poetic voice are “multitudes split and collide, code-switch and conjure” 

‘Neptune’s Projects’ is a post-apocalyptic, climate crisis inspired, collection of poems that utilises what Robert Robinson calls as adding “postmodern panache and mythic irony to the tradition of the open sea” In ‘How to Measure an Ocean’ he alludes to the German polymath and geographer Alexander von Humboldt, and in an aspirational tone imagines him attempting to comprehend primarily the vastness of the natural world, but specifically his “agony uncle” evoking questions of empirical and intrinsic knowledge. Using the form of a ballad, his use of conversational and accessible language thus often asks engaging questions with a hint of humour, satire and farce.