Description

Across sixty-one poems written over six years and three Indian cities, Mehr Singh’s second collection takes the small, sharp materials of an ordinary life — a mother’s silence at a Chandigarh dining table, a Bombay terrace in monsoon, an aunt’s wedding sari in a Delhi almirah, a long-distance phone call from a man no longer answering — and builds from them a body of work of remarkable emotional precision.

Divided into four sections — *Salt*, *Mothers*, *Cities*, and *The Long Summer* — *Salt and Other Cities* moves with a deceptively quiet voice through the great late-2020s Indian themes: leaving the small town, watching one’s parents grow old at long-distance, the slow loss of a language, the difficulty of writing love poems for a country one is also, simultaneously, learning to be furious with.

Some of these poems will be read at weddings. Some at funerals. Many will be quietly photographed and forwarded between sisters and friends. A handful — the title poem; the unforgettable *Letter to My Mother, Aged Sixty-Eight*; the searing four-page *Karachi, in My Grandmother’s Handwriting* — are likely to enter the small permanent canon of contemporary Indian English poetry.

Spare, sensual, devastating, and finally luminous, *Salt and Other Cities* announces Mehr Singh as one of the most important Indian poetic voices of her generation.