States of the Body Produced by Love

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 states: attraction and repulsion,