Published Poetry
(All poems are linked either to the publishers' pages or my Medium page)
The ghost of pestis, mirrors the times. When she despairs, she also rhymes.
Published in a Croatia based literary magazine called ZVONA i NARI, in 2022.
About the poems: These poems represent the ethos of the deadly covid waves India went through between 2020 and 2022.
The first rhyme is about shock and denial.
The second is about dystopia and existential angst.
The third, about despair and madness.
My poem, a single rhyme titled 'Papita and Martin', has been anthologized in a book titled 'ZOOANTHOLOGY: About the Animals in our Lives', published by Sweetycat Press (USA), in 2022.
It is available for purchase on Amazon.
About this poem: I have spent 17 years in Mumbai, raising two loyal lhasas, only to realise they do not belong there. They’re meant to play around in the snow in Tibet, not suffer the heat of India. I'm sorry.
Read it here on my Medium page.
Pestilential Phantasmagoria
My poem ‘Pestilential Phantasmagoria’ has been published in an Indian literary magazine called The Hooghly Review (issue 1 — April 2023). It’s an ode to the madness of 2020–2022, as seen through the prism of ephemeral creativity. It’s for and about — and here’s an alternative title for the piece — the ‘poets of the pandemic’.
Read it here on my Medium page.
Vegetarian Breakfast
Published in One Art: a journal of poetry (USA) in May 2023 and Sein und Werden (UK) in July 2023
Monster
The 2020 pandemic turned me into a passionate reader of medical anthropology and plague-themed literature. My deep interest in the way microbes, pathogens, bacteria and germs shape human lives and history has bled into my fiction and poetry.
Seen through the eyes of microbial bacteria, humans appear very different than they do to themselves. To them, lovers who cohabit are but one large, mysterious mammal with disproportionate, detachable parts who pass on the flu to one another when they get intimate.
This is my first attempt at a non-rhyming poem.
Published in Iceblink Lit (USA), Tap into Poetry (England) and Papers Publishing (USA), in May 2023.
Read it here on Medium.
Yersinia Pestis
About: My poetry chapbook 'Yersinia Pestis' has been published by Los Angeles-based Bottlecap Press (September 2023)
Yersinia Pestis, the bacterium that led to the deadly medieval plague, is the eponym of this chapbook, a collection of six poems of varying length and style but similar in theme, mood and clime.
Some of these poems were written during the worst hour of the recent pandemic, while others were born in the afterglow of the carnage. But all six pieces germinated from the same idea, that human beings and the microbes that infect, envenom and slaughter them are very alike. Just like us, these invisible germs want to reproduce and thrive, with little concern for the creatures they live off.
This mix of rhymes and free verse is a meditation on the human condition as seen through the prism of disease. It’s also an ode to the existential angst, despair, disquietude and madness that the plague of our century has left in its wake.
Purchase here.