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.