Cinema of Poems
A library of unspoken words.
Cinema of Poems is a digital library for original Nepali poetry — a dedicated reading space for the debut collection Lukeka Sabdaharu (लुकेका शब्दहरू, "Hidden Words"), built with room for more collections to follow.
Technology
What wasn't working.
- 01Poetry doesn't have a natural home on social media — it gets buried in a feed instead of read the way it's meant to be read.
- 02Nepali-language creative writing rarely gets a dedicated, well-typeset digital space of its own.
What it does instead.
A standalone reading experience — an entrance, a library shelf, and a dedicated reader view — built specifically around Devanagari typography and the pacing of a poetry collection, rather than adapted from a generic blog template.
What it actually does.
Dedicated Reader View
A distraction-free reading page separate from the library shelf, built for moving through a collection page by page.
Devanagari-First Typography
Typeset around Nepali script from the ground up, not bolted on as an afterthought to an English-first design.
Paired Poem Structure
Each page in Lukeka Sabdaharu pairs two poems — one of grief, one of hope — mirroring the collection's own structure.
Growing Library Shelf
The library page is built to hold more than one book, with upcoming collections already reserved a place on the shelf.
How it actually got built.
- 01
Writing Lukeka Sabdaharu
The poems came first — fifty pages exploring love, separation, loneliness, and hope.
- 02
Designing the reading experience
Built a library, a book page, and a dedicated reader, instead of dropping the collection into a PDF or a blog post.
- 03
Leaving room to grow
Reserved space on the library shelf for the collections that come next, instead of building something that only ever fits one book.
Where this goes next.
- Publish the next poetry collection currently reserved on the library shelf.
- Expand the reader as more collections are written.
- Keep building Cinema of Poems as a long-term home for the work, not a one-off site.