Exploring themes of identity and cultural conflict, the narrative delves into the speaker's perception of the world shaped by their experiences and relationships. It reflects on the tension between different cultures, highlighting a struggle for understanding and connection amidst societal divides. The evocative language suggests a deep introspection and a desire for unity in a world facing extinction.
Nisha Ramayya's second collection situates listening as a political act; a way of attuning to the world around us, paying attention, and understanding our interconnectedness
Love is a many-headed snake in Nisha Ramayya's debut poetry collection, twisting its way through devotion, sacrifice, and bliss. Seeking a way home, Ramayya discovers that homecoming - the impossible return - is a process of make-believe and magical thinking across Britain, India, and the infinite expanse.Ramayya's visionary poetry traces an opalescent, treacherous world by way of heritage, ritual, and myth. Thousand-petalled lotuses bloom inside skulls, goddesses with dirty feet charm honeybees, strains of jazz standards bleed into anti-national anthems. Meditating on diasporic identity and relationships, her writing roams the Indo-European language family, finds consolation in genealogies of decolonial and anti-racist resistance, and roots itself in the movements between ancient Sanskrit texts and contemporary feminist prose poems.In Ramayya's hands, the body assumes many forms as love produces many attraction and repulsion, excitement and exhaustion, selfishness and the dissolution of self. Desire, eroticism, and care contain the possibilities of shame, fury, and destruction. Moving towards and away from love, being translated and transformed by love, suffering under love and refusing its power - the poems in this book never leave love's hold.