My Life Closed Twice

“Subhashini Kaligotla’s ingeniously fashioned poetic structures—which are light, flexible, delicate yet possessed of remarkable tensile strength and architectural clarity and integrity—aren’t just beautiful in themselves. They’re also vessels for deep imaginative feeling and thinking and wondering and longing. She has a unique, compelling lyric voice and a distinguished twenty-first century consciousness.”
Vijay Seshadri

“Anger, denial, bargaining, despair, all the stages of grief except acceptance, each stage overlaid with the forensic precision generated by love when it has nowhere to go. These enraged, laceratingly plainspoken poems burn with the singular self-awareness that is the writer’s curse, and the writer’s gift. Two deaths enclose the book, the ‘two dates // enclosed / by parentheses’. It is impossible to read, say, ‘Only Your Brother Will You Lose’—its fifty shards hammered into the flesh like fifty nine-inch nails—and come away unscathed.”
Jeet Thayil

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Subhashini Kaligotla is a poet and an art historian of premodern South Asia. She is author of the poetry collection Bird of the Indian Subcontinent and the art history monograph Shiva’s Waterfront Temples: Architects and Their Audiences in Medieval India. She teaches at Columbia, dividing her time between New York City and Hyderabad.