Piecemeal

In Piecemeal, Ahana Banerji inhabits the soft and the small: wrists, fists, and window frost, mustard seed

and salmon scale. Her poetry lives inside the minute pressures of everyday life, inside the shudders and

bruises of the human body. In paying careful attention to parts of the whole, Banerji's smallest gestures

become suddenly enormous. These are poems about fear and family, about love and language and hunger.

Banerji moves through a variety of forms-villanelle, prose poem, 'bedtime story'-with a quiet rhythmic

confidence. And from within the glistening structures of the poems, we glimpse strange characters and

conversations. There are mothers and daughters, gods and lobsters, Federico García Lorca and Joan

Didion.

At the heart of Piecemeal, though, is the speaker's promise to herself: 'I, too, will be / good. Good / as the

jugular's perfect hyacinth'. It is an intensely vivid and hopeful promise from a powerful new voice in

poetry.