Join us April 28th (18:30, Zoom) for the launch of
'Piecemeal'
by Ahana Banerji with special guests Bhanu Kapil, Prerana Kumar and Leo Kang
Join us for the online launch of 'Piecemeal' by Ahana Banerji on April 28th with special guests Bhanu Kapil, Prerana Kumar and Leo Kang
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.
Praise for 'Piecemeal'
From the first few lines of the very first poem, you know you’re in the hands of an accomplished poet. Banerji’s work brings a lightness of touch that belies the depth charge of her imagery and the beauty of her language.
Exploring nature, mothers and daughters, longing and belongingness, Piecemeal is tender in places, raw in others. On reading, one feels gently bruised by a master of both form and feeling. This is poetry “So razor fresh. So crocus fresh”. A poet to watch out for.
JP Seabright - poet
About the Poets:
Ahana Banerji is a three-time Foyle Young Poet and was a Tower Young Poet in 2020. In 2022, she was the youngest shortlisted poet for the White Review Poet’s Prize. Most recently, her work has been published by Bad Lilies, Zindabad, and Anthropocene. ‘Piecemeal’ is her debut poetry
pamphlet. She is currently studying at Cambridge University.
Bhanu Kapil, FRSL is a poet based in Cambridge, where she is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College. Her poetry collection, How To Wash A Heart, won the TS Eliot Prize. Kapil is also the recipient of a Windham Campbell prize from Yale University and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. A new edition of a hybrid prose work, Incubation: a space for monsters, was published in 2023 by Prototype in the UK and Kelsey Street Press in the United States. Currently, Kapil is developing performances and notes towards a novel of the forest, La Jungla, which derives its title from an unfinished installation by Ana Mendieta.
Prerana Kumar(they/them) is an Indian writer and editor based in London. They won the Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poet’s Prize 2022. They are currently reading for a doctorate in Creative Writing at QMUL. Their work appears in Magma, The White Review, The Poetry Review, Prototype, and bath magg among others.
Leo Kang is from West Yorkshire. He won the 2022 Tower Poetry Competition and is a former Foyle Young Poet and Poetry Society Young Critic. His poems have appeared in Oxford Magazine, Anthropocene, COUNTERCLOCK, and others. He is currently studying English at Cambridge University, where he is Editor of The Mays Anthology.
