Description
Athira Unni asks the important questions: whether our lives are just storyboards, and when it’s gone, whether we will miss our madness. Metaphors make these questions come alive: spectacles that see ‘opinionlands’, a jacaranda tree that is a soccer trainer and a woman whose dark breaths are hurricanes. Dexterous and disruptively luminous, capable of ‘disturbing the fairies’ and ‘deranging the dragonflies’, these utterances take wing. — Arundhathi Subrahmaniam, author of The Gallery of Upside Down Women
The craft of these poems shimmers through startling images and deliberate, breathing spaces between lines, so that each page feels composed not only of words but of silence and echo. This is not a book to be read once and set aside, but one to be revisited, its music revealing new notes with each reading. — Sivakami Velliangiri, author of How We Measured Time
Athira Unni is a pointillist of language. These poems sift through your mind and hypnotise your senses with dazzling and devastating epiphanies. — Arjun Rajendran, author of One Man, Two Executions
Athira Unni wrote her first poem for an English examination when she was 11. While earning her Creative Writing Certificate from SUNY Buffalo, she had the good fortune to be taught by Prof Myung mi Kim, the renown Korean-American poet who has considerably influenced her creative process. She is a member of the poetry collective The Quarantine Train and maintains a blog that she has had since high school. Athira founded Qissa, a bilingual English-Malayalam literary magazine that saw four issues before taking a hiatus. Her debut poetry collection Gaea and Other Poems (2020) was published by Writer’s Workshop, Kolkata. She has a doctorate in English from Leeds Beckett University, UK. Also, Athira lives with her husband and her kid, and currently divides her time between her hometown Calicut and the sunny California.
FROM THE BOOK
to Calicut
yet another misty shower waters the moors.
on the horizon, a church spire stings the sky.
trampled grass under bovine commas —
brown, white, and black.
while sitting at my window
this lager-laden Yorkshire evening,
I imagine your friendly shores:
a beach stretches with kites —
numerous. I remember
the smell of pickled gooseberries,
acidic, the unhappening shore
with memories of short jaunty walks.
you wait with morsels of biriyani,
and sarbath, and muttamaala.
you inflate my heart gloriously
and re-member me
in one-word sonnet memories.
I remember you, dear town,
haunted by crows, and your colonial debris
of a sea bridge. a baby owl perches and hoots.
nuns smile and sing hymns. I will return
for a chicken dish and a glass of lime tea.
cottage flu
when the world
is a village
the cottage
that catches fire
burns the world
terra firma
when I become an island
I’m certain you’ll row to me
play me a tune your lips
could never knit into a song
po-yum
the whistle blows and the po-yum
immediately writes itself
in Malayalam slangs of old.
I’ve located such blankness in misery:
but it’s actually part of a po-yum
note that a po-yum is not a po-yem
let alone a poe-em—
a po-yum is an attempt
at saying it true.
a po-yum is a song of chaos
a yellow ringer phone
a place that airs movies.
moreover, a po-yum is not a poe-em
which is longer and more morbid than it should be.
a poe-em is a number
a po-yum is a word
a po-yum ends, with a click
just like this.
