Description

Hear the silent grief of shrinking rivers,

the rumble and roar of mighty oceans,

behold the last tribe of fireflies in our bamboo forests

in one final tango, spread across the twilight.

With lyrical grace, Smitha illuminates the struggles faced by women across cultures, transcending boundaries of time and space. Through captivating verses, readers are invited to embark on a transformative journey, challenging societal norms and advocating for change. – Sanjay Jain

In the book’s title, How Women Become Poems in Malabar, Sehgal reveals three main themes of the book: the feminine experience, transformation, and the unique setting of the coast of Malabar, along the Arabian Sea. – Natalie Solmer

Smitha Sehgal’s fierce and beautiful poetry is not like anything else being written today. The terrifying scope of her images, the intelligence of her allusions, combine with a strong, yet never polemical, awareness of the edginess of female experience. – Fiona Sampson

Sehgal whirs and roars in images, in imagist precision, in fearless investigation of her roots and dilemmas. How Women Become Poems in Malabar is her autobiography, her growing up to be a poet. It guides both the experienced poet who will recognise his or her own journey in hers, and the amateur who can read this resplendent first collection to learn how to become one. – Indran Amirthanayagam

Smitha Sehgal is an Indian poet and legal professional. She was born and raised in the coastal town of Calicut in the Malabar region of northern Kerala. Mesmerised and influenced by the Arabian Sea and tropical Sun, she grew up speaking poetry as her first language. An alumna of Govt Law College, Calicut, she has completed two-and-a-half decades of an illustrious career in law. Through the power of poetry, she seeks to redefine a world where the dignity of a woman and girl child is preserved as a fundamental freedom beyond statutes. Her poems have been widely published in prestigious journals in India and abroad and are included in notable anthologies. Her fiction ‘Colourless’ won the Reading Hour-Lekhana Short Story Contest 2015 Prize. Currently, she is working on her first collection of fiction.