Kitchen Poems

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Author: Nithya Mariam John
Published Date: 18/01/2025
ISBN: 978-81-978592-9-8
Paperback: Paperback
Pages: 100
Categories: ,

Description

In Kitchen Poems, Nithya gathers ingredients, stirs the stew, and lets the juices flow. Poem after poem is a miracle of abundance. I peel my heart and slice my body at every supper; I leave the dough of sorrows to rise overnight to make lacy appams at sunrise. ‘Daily Bread’ brings home an intermingling of generational transitions. And then I am carried away — woman to woman to woman as the speaker’s mother slides down the jackfruit branch in her Kanchipuram sari — core embodied memories come to life in ‘Seven Nights of Mourning’. There are intermittent poems where Nithya moves into the world of working from home and the ubiquitous Swiggy, in an almost nonchalant voice. The reader arrives from there to a lingering ache, It took four feverish nights, that devoured a quarter of the moon, to finally get you out of my abdomen! In ‘Chapati’, there is a voice of insistence as well as of secret-keeping; the poem becomes a chapati box: The poker-faced chapatis gave away nothing about the fresh scars on the mother’s face. Because I am obsessed with a good curd poem: I sift and sieve the word throughout the day; yet it refuses to separate at night. Each poem in this collection navigates the grey space between life and death, the peepholes between dos and don’ts, nourishment, and setting free. As a collection, Kitchen Poems expands the circle of recipes we all carry. Each poem is a prayer bowl that holds particularities, yet its resonance extends beyond the beginnings of its ingredients. Metaphors and imagery are so natural that they arrive at the kitchen table as a gentle sprinkling of poetic techniques. Above all else, this collection represents human connection in the deepest essence. — Kashiana Singh, President, North Carolina Poetry Society, and the author of Woman by the Door and Crushed Anthills

Yummy.  That sums up Nithya’s Kitchen Poems. It’s a heady mix of memories wrapped in a tender plantain leaf. Right from the opening poem, ‘Elayada,’ passing through the ball of rice dipped in fish curry (‘Goodbye’), ending with ‘Porotta’, Nithya conjures up a world sprinkled with sights, smells and tastes of a bygone era and of the present, as she takes the reader on a fine gastronomical journey. Truly, a treat for the senses. Savour it, word by word. — Anoop Thomas, former news editor, The New Indian Express, Kerala

Nithya Mariam John is a poet and translator from Kerala, India. A 2022 Pushcart Prize-nominee and a semi-finalist for 2023 Sundress Poetry Broadside Contest, her scribblings are spaced in Qissa, gulmohar quarterly, Muddy River Review, Indian Literature, Last Leaves, The New Indian Express, and Times of India, among the others. She has translated the works of noted Malayalam writers including Unni R, Shahina EK, Gracy, Kala Sajeevan, Sujeesh, Zacher, Anju Sajith and R Sangeetha into English. When not reading or weaving on looms, Nithya loves to converse on literature with her students at BCM College, Kottayam, Kerala. At times, she zips her mouth and spills pain, pleasure and all that falls in between, on tea-stained notepads.