- 124 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
When I Reach for Your Pulse
About This Book
In this electrifying debut, lyric works to untangle slippery personal and political histories in the wake of a parent's suicide. "When my father finally / died, " Vyas writes, "we [...] burned, / like an effigy, the voiceless body." Grief returns us to elemental silence, where "the wind is a muted vowel in the brush of pine / branches" across American landscapes. These poems extend formal experimentation, caesurae, and enjambment to reach into the emptiness and fractures that remain. This language listens as much as it sings, asking: can we recover from the muting effects of British colonialism, American imperialism, patriarchy, and caste hierarchies? Which cultural legacies do we release in order to heal? Which do we keep alive, and which keep us alive? A monument to yesterday and a missive to tomorrow, When I Reach for Your Pulse reminds us of both the burden and the promise of inheritance. "[T]he wail outlasts / the dream, " but time falls like water and so "the stream survives its source."
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Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- ॐ नमो नारायणाय
- Effigy
- Midwest Physics: First Law
- Entomology // Mirage
- Funeral: Durga Puja
- Beads
- Suicide Note in absentia, Part 1
- Attachment
- Morning Chant: Cave
- Conditional Bridges
- Viveka Vairāgya at the Amtrak Station
- Double Slit
- When I Reach for Your Pulse
- ॐ नमो नारायणाय
- Love Story with Rolex
- Proverb in absentia
- Midwest Physics: Second Law
- Making Ghee in This American Kitchen
- Nāranga aurantium
- Remembrance
- I Saw You and I Learned This, Beloved
- Raga of Bapu’s Hand as Brueghel’s Icarus with Rilke and a Swami in It
- Suicide Note in absentia, Part 2
- ॐ नमो नारायणाय
- Scaffold
- ॐ नमो नारायणाय
- Cremation :: Translation
- Diaspora
- Funeral: Pilgrimage
- Morning Chant: Scatter
- Exegesis as Quarter Cento from the Wagah Border
- Postcard from Amritsar
- Ars Poetica
- When I Reach for Your Pulse (again)
- Reincarnation
- Suicide Note in absentia, Part 3
- ॐ नमो नारायणाय
- Midwest Physics: Third Law
- Effigy (again)
- Radial
- Man of the House Falls in Obeisance to the Saint of the Otherwise Frugal
- Dear Paranoia,
- Wedding
- New Definition of Blues
- Netī Netī
- ॐ नमो नारायणाय
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author