Acclaimed Indonesian author Laksmi Pamuntjak has written for Tempo magazine, The Jakarta Post, the socioeconomic journal Prisma, and was the resident food columnist for Djakarta! magazine. She edited, translated and introduced Goenawan Mohamad: Selected Poems and is a cofounder of the bilingual bookstore Aksara, in Jakarta. Her book of poetry, Ellipsis, was chosen as one of the Books of the Year in 2005 by The Herald UK.

The urban cinematic psychodramas of contemporary Jakarta which Pamuntjak creates draw on multiple cultural and societal referents and do not pander to cheap exoticism. The stories revolve around an artist, a painter of women, whom we meet only through the thoughts of his subjects. The stories are impressionistic and at times densely poetic, but are also healthily obsessed with the human minutiae of thought, sense, the political and the physical. In terms of Sanskrit poetics, to properly read these linked tales is to become a rasik, a lover. There is a sensual efflorescence reminiscent of the work of Patricia Duncker. These are vignettes; linked, dynamic portraits of whores, hairdressers, artists, housewives, workers, mothers; for like Pamunjak’s characters, reality is chimaeric, brief, intense, past.

...An aesthetically intense and powerfully sensual poetry collection, in which the mess and fragility of human relationships is enmeshed with politics and religion. The poetry is attuned, meticulous, deft and the reader is transfigured by a "lea of silences". – The Herald UK