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These are fierce poems, Amazonian in their reach which challenges male territory and waterfalls but further challenges young women to find their warrior selves. Transgression, tresspass and daring are vital in them. However, the anguish of being female is just as vigorously their property. Read "Cartographer of the Breast."
Karen Swenson, author of Landlady in Bangkok and A Daughter's Latitude: New and Selected Poems
Venkateswaran's second collection outstrips her first in many ways: it is substantial in volume and contains a wider range of subjects and themes; external events, geographies, and mythologies collide with interior reckonings to pose poetic epiphanies; as often as not, the poems pirouette on the dance floor of the page. This is overall a thoughtful, witty, dramatic, and provocative collection.
Saleem Peeradina, author of The Ocean in My Yard, Group Portrait, and Meditations on Desire
About the author
Pramila Venkateswaran, poet laureate of Suffolk County, Long Island (2013-15), is the author of Thirtha (Yuganta Press, 2002), Behind Dark Waters (Plain View Press, 2008), Draw Me Inmost (Stockport Flats, 2009), Trace (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Thirteen Days to Let Go (Aldrich Press, 2015), and Slow Ripening (Local Gems, 2016). An award-winning poet, she teaches English and Women's Studies at Nassau Community College, New York. Author of numerous essays on poetics as well as creative non-fiction, she is also the 2011 Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Long Island Poet of the Year. She has performed her poems internationally in festivals, such as the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and Festival Internacional de Poesia de Granada, and is the co-director of Matwaala: South Asian Diaspora Poetry Festival.
