A book of poetry that is an archive of absence and presence

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In her preface to the book, Three Women in a Single-Room House, K. Srilata says, “I think of poetry as a continuous struggle against amnesia, a mode of bearing mindful witness to and remembering the lives of those we love.

These poems are an archiving of the self in a web of inter-being, a logbook of human presences and absences." She then proceeds to tell the readers about her circumstances, her family history and the ways that the contours of her life were shaped by her experiences, by the persons whom she met or hadn’t met, by the policies of her state even and as we turn the pages of this book, her words coalesce into a rousing life-narrative through poetry. In Three Women in a Single-Room House, K. Srilata K.

creates a slim volume of verse that offers poetic control. Using poems of varying lengths on interconnected themes, she creates light and shadows. While she has always been polyphonous, Three Women employs multiple voices to populate a single poetic universe that soon we too find ourselves living in.

With each poem, the reader is drawn to invest in the poems and in the lives that have been narrated. While many of the poems are confessional or personal—after all Srilata counts Kamala Das as one of her inspirations—there is something about the poems that makes it everyone’s story. The book begins powerfully with the titular poem exploring how women occupy spaces.

This idea of space and its occupancy continue in the poems that follow. The telegram that arrived was petal-wrinkled. I knew right away. Grandmother dead. Stop. Come at once. Stop (She was the Kind of Woman who Liked Such Stories) The entire span of the life and times of the grandmother seems to be ensconced in the