Virmati, a young woman born in Amritsar into an austere and high-minded household, falls in love with a neighbour, the Professor--a man who is already married. That the Professor eventually marries Virmati, installs her in his home (alongside his furious first wife) and helps her towards further studies in Lahore, is small consolation to her scandalised family. Or even to Virmati, who finds that the battle for her own independence has created irrevocable lines of partition and pain around her.

    In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.

    In Life of the Party, she weaves together her own coming of age with an investigation into our culture's romanticization of violence against women. In precise, searing language—at times blistering and riotous, at times soulful and exuberant—she explores the boundary between what is real and what is imagined in a life saturated with fear. How does one grow from a girl to a woman in a world wracked by violence? Where is the line between perpetrator and victim? What is the meaning of bravery? Visceral and haunting, this multifaceted collection illustrates that what happens to our bodies makes us who we are.

    In both it is ultimately the women who suffer, whether, paradoxically, from a surfeit of feasting and family life in India, or from self-denial and starvation in the US. or both. Uma, the plain, older daughter still lives at home, frustrated in her attempts to escape and make a life for herself. Her Indian family is difficult , demanding but mostly, good hearted. Despite her disappointments, Uma comes through as the survivor, avoiding an unfulfilling marriage, liek her sister's or a suicidal one, like that arranged for her pretty cousin. And in America, where young Arun goes as a student, men in the suburbs char hunks of bleeding meat while the women don't appear to cook or eat at all - seems bewildering and terriying to the young Indian adolescent far from home.

    Darkness engulfs the Indian subcontinent. The 17th century is destined to be an era of brutal wars, incessant oppression, and physical and spiritual carnage in the name of religion. Shivaji, a warrior and thinker far ahead of his times, rises and renders a rousing dream - respect and dignity for human life, economic equity, and empowerment. Destiny does not favour him; he faces terribile odds - a fallen and defeated populace, the might of the Mughal Empire, and naval supremacy of the Western powers. Thus begins a battle of conflicting ideologies, contrasting belief systems, and sharply different visions of India - a stake is the future of most ancient civilization. Witness the beginnings of the momentous events that will send thunderbolts across centuries, the echoes of which still haunt the subcontinent.

    Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life—a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road—she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone “doesn’t observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.”​

    Technically brilliant, using strict, classical prosody, yet entirely modern in sensibility, Virginia Adair's poetry will play a central role in the ongoing American poetry renaissance.

    More witty and stylish poetic therapy for the Venus and Mars generation.

    An admired contemporary of Rilke, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam, Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva bore witness to the turmoil and devastation of the Revolution, and chronicled her difficult life in exile, sustained by the inspiration and power of her modern verse.The poems in this selection are drawn from eleven volumes published over thirty years.

    home body is a collection of raw, honest conversations with oneself – reminding readers to fill up on love, acceptance, community, family, and embrace change. Illustrated by the author, themes of nature and nurture, light and dark, rest here.i dive into the well of my bodyand end up in another worldeverything i needalready exists in methere’s no needto look anywhere else– home

    The greatest Americans Have not been born yet They are waiting quietly For their past to die please give blood Here is the account of a man so ravished by a kiss that it distorts his highest and lowest frequencies of understanding into an Incongruent mean of babble and brilliance...

    It is a recipe for womanhood that changes with the whim of the seasons and the political climate. It is a feverish fistful of musings, a comedy of errors, an instruction manual, a compass, an overheard conversation in the ladies' loo, whispered secrets over a (second) bottle of wine. It is a lamentation, an homage to fellow women, at once a celebration of things to come and a mourning of things lost. It is a redefinition of what it is to be magical and otherwordly. It exposes the complex and contradictory impulses of the human spirit, the ugly tangle of emotions we must deal with in ourselves and also as a wider society. With frankness, humour and a decided fuck-you to fear, Vanessa digs deeper than she ever has to find something resembling sorcery.

    Divided by class but united in fandom, they remain steadfast in their search for intimacy, independence and fun. Embracing Hindi film idol Shah Rukh Khan allows them a small respite from an oppressive culture, a fillip to their fantasies of a friendlier masculinity in Indian men. Most struggle to find the freedom-or income-to follow their favourite actor.Bobbing along in this stream of multiple lives for more than a decade-from Manju's boredom in 'rurban' Rampur and Gold's anger at having to compete with Western women for male attention in Delhi's nightclubs, to Zahira's break from domestic abuse in Ahmedabad-Bhattacharya gleans the details on what Indian women think about men, money, movies, beauty, helplessness, agency and love. A most unusual and compelling book on the female gaze, this is the story of how women have experienced post-liberalization India.

    You've been nothing but an inconvenience. Guised as an instructive manual, A Handbook For My Lover chronicles six years in the life of an unconventional affair between a young woman writer and her older photographer lover.The sensuous epistle documents the woman's demands and desires, her fantasies and eccentricities as she negotiates the minefield that is their relationship.A Handbook For My Lover is a poetic, erotic account of two lovers fated to seek refuge in the transient. It is a celebration of all that is momentary and fleeting rather than that which is permanent.

    Forced to work as a servant in the home of her uncle, a rich rug designer in the court of the Shah, the young woman blossoms as a brilliant designer of carpets. But while her talent flourishes, her prospects for a happy marriage grow dim, and she finds herself faced with a daunting decision--to forsake her own dignity or to risk everything in an effort to maintain it.Both a sweeping love story and a luminous portrait of a city, The Blood of Flowers is the mesmerizing historical novel of an ill-fated young woman whose gift as a rug designer transforms her life. Illuminated with glorious detail of Persian rug-making, and brilliantly bringing to life the sights sounds and life of 17th-century Isfahan, The Blood of Flowers has captured readers' imaginations everywhere as a timeless tale of one woman's struggle to live a life of her choosing.