Alumna Subhashini Kaligotla '06 Releases Debut Poetry Collection 'Bird of the Indian Subcontinent'

Poetry alumna Subhashini Kaligotla ‘06 will be holding a Poetry reading and conversation with Professor Timothy Donnelly '98 Friday, April 5 at 7pm at Book Culture to celebrate her first book of poems, Bird of the Indian Subcontinent. The collection won The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective's Emerging Poets Prize and was selected by poet Arundhathi Subramaniam, who praises the book for its "capacity to calibrate the many subtle textures of longing."

Bird of the Indian Subcontinent launched in India in January 2018, and Kaligotla’s book tour included events at Atta Galatta Bookstore in Bangalore, Lamakaan and Central University in Hyderabad, Harvard’s Villa I Tatti in Florence, and Curious Fox Books in Berlin. In the United States, the book debuted in the autumn with a reading in New Haven. New York City events will include readings and a book party at Book Culture and Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop. The collection is the sixth book from the (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, founded in 2013 in Bangalore. Under a peer mentorship model, the Collective publishes books by innovative, diverse poets with a connection to India.

Bird of the Indian Subcontinent has been called “a brilliant testament to the Collective’s mission of discovering and nurturing the best new poets coming out of India and the diaspora.”

An excerpt from the poem, 'How Stubborn the Heart,' reads, “Playing her urgent monotone. Everything I had said forgotten. Everything she had sworn forgotten. Grown back to full strength like prairie grass after a great fire. Rhizome intact, buried somewhere deep in his soil. Resurrected, twisted Lazarus. So then make Manu proud and make me an emblem for standing by my man, though he incommunicado and I destitute, though he several seas away and I seeking pleasure elsewhere, though he someone else’s husband and I devoid. Worship him as a god, O faithful wife.”

Kaligotla is a poet and architectural historian of medieval India. A Kundiman poetry fellow, she has published in such journals as The Caravan, diode, LUMINA, New England Review, and The Literary Review. Anthology appearances include collections of Indian and diaspora poetry, most notably Penguin India’s 60 Indian Poets and the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. As editor, she has curated the poetry content of Catamaran and Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art. Kaligotla also holds a PhD in art history from Columbia University and is Assistant Professor of Indian and South Asian Art in the History of Art Department at Yale University.