Vandana Khanna, The Goddess Monologues
Vandana Khanna's first collection, Train to Agra, won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize and her second collection, Afternoon Masala, was the co-winner of the 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in the New England Review, The Missouri Review, 32 Poems and Prairie Schooner as well as the anthologies Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation and Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry.
Vandana Khanna’s work reminds me why we read poetry. These poems in the voices of Hindu goddesses speak with authority and clarity to what it means to be human, to our desires and our disappointments, to the multiple deaths and rebirths we experience in a lifetime. Blas Falconer __________________ The imaginative language and elegant lines found in the poems of The Goddess Monologues propel the reader to carefully and fully examine their own thumping hearts. Behind these beautiful and tightly controlled personas, Khanna deftly steers us through a rich landscape where the voiceless can finally be heard “…raw and rustling like sugar cane,” and where the night fills “with the tight snap of bow, the hollow whistle of arrows on fire.” Aimee Nezhukumatathil
