Afterbody by Medha Singh
Medha Singh’s poems deal with grief, absence, love and loss, often engaging with the concrete and small as a funnel for the larger ideas that govern us. Her work relies on image and music more than movement and action, which is really a way of thinking of identity and place as rooted in one’s experience of language – the sounds inside the voice of your mother, the words on pages of school books – all have a way of affecting the internal music of our everyday experience. Quotidian and intimate, Afterbody speaks of what survives us: it is the body’s secret laid bare. Singh’s style is unashamedly modernist and blends deft wit with seriousness of purpose. She builds a primordial homeland from the shifting tectonic plates of memory and the spaces we occupy.
“Gorgeous, poignant, beautifully evocative and strange, masterfully subtle, yet poetically exhilarating… Afterbody will properly announce Singh as one of the most notable emerging poets in Scotland.” —Alan Gillis
“Medha’s work is honed and stylistically assured and informed by the wide range of her reading across literature, cultural theory and philosophy. And yet, her poetry is never mannered and always, as Henri Cole says – as all good poetry must be – ‘dipped in the oil of human feeling’. Afterbody is stark, spiky, discursive, as Medha never allows grief in her poems to become an end in itself and instead triangulates grief as a battleground and elegy as a ruined field for self-interrogation and reckoning with the dead, and more than a site to simply erect a memorial.” —Rohan Chhetri
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