Conversation about Withering

A In the spring of 2015, a chance poetic
conversation began between two poets separated by
decades, continents, languages and literary traditions.
Colombian poet Cristina Snchez Lpez was writing
from her bed, irreversibly ailed by aortic aneurysm and
congestive heart failure leading to multiple
complications. With reduced mobility, "breathing room"
and daily bouts of bleeding and excruciating pain,
Cristina was living a vestige of a life hanging like icicle
from a sliver of desperate hope. Writing, when her body
permitted, became her mechanism of deconstruction.
Almost all of her bedridden work assumed an epistolary
form and was directed at Aryanil Mukherjee, a bilingual
Indian American poet whose work she had found on the
web and began to admire. In response to her poetic
inquiry, Aryanil began advancing the conversation in the
form of a poem, taking it to crevices of comfort extrinsic
to both the plexus of pain and the refuge of nature. A
part of this ongoing conversation, conducted in its
entirety via texting makes the content of this book.