Kirjahaku

Athena Kashyap's newest collection, Sita's Choice, explores issues relating to women, especially in India. Taking off from Sita, the main female character in the Ramayana, explores her decision to leave her husband, Ram, and return to her mother, Earth. These mythical and magical poems examine the duality of nature, the sacrifices women make daily, and the deeper societal ills such as female foeticide, dowry deaths, violence against women, and the role of the media, ""Ravan's hundred thousand eyes,"" in perpetuating this violence. The book also explores motherhood through poems that look at the mother-child bond, ""the formless, uncharted shape of love,"" as well as the pain of childbirth, ""It rises—multi-hued, magnificent.

Crossing Black Waters is an exploration of borders through one family's personal odyssey from the violent upheaval of the Partition of India in 1947 to emigrating to the U.S. The book delves into the psychological impact of leaving behind a past that keeps ""pulsating behind swinging shutters of thought"" to recreate lives and identities anew, and searches for ""home""--a ""lonely room in the [my] mind,"" a ""heartache"" at the ""end of rainbows,"" or else a fictitious ""country,"" built around ""hubs"" of friendships forged over ""glasses of wine and tandoori chicken."" A key phrase is ""I am knot""--the ""not"" of losing one's identity and family coupled with the idea that one cannot truly be separate and is ""knotted"" with the past and kin for life.