The Face I Desire

Sometimes the skillful poet plays the alchemist, creating beauty from moments of pain and suffering. In her new collection The Face I Desire, Renuka Raghavan dons her poetic wizard’s robe and does exactly that, bringing to the task a razor-sharp eye for detail and a profound sympathy for the human condition that never veers into sentimentality. Into her glowing crucible go the moments of suffering to which she bears witness…and out comes gold. — Charles Coe, author of Memento Mori