One of the finest poets writing in India today.’ – Keki Daruwalla, The Hindu ‘This is masterful work from a writer working at the height of her powers.’– Selectors, Winter Choice, 2014, Poetry Book Society ‘By turns both laconic and passionate, she asks questions about morality and integrity that many poets simply refuse to take on. Yet she is also an extraordinary love poet… A remarkable book from a remarkable poet.’ – John Burnside, Poetry Review ‘Arundhathi Subramaniam has already won acclaim as a poet of integrity…There is a beautiful uncertainty about her poems… intimately physical, intense enough to scald and char, along with a will to withdraw, to renounce… uninhibitedly sensual while still yearning for transcendence. This ambivalence, combined with a sense of wonder, of unexpectedness, of moods as well as words, is what marks her apart.’ – K. Satchidanandan, Frontline ‘…a strong personality and an individual voice; her poems feel as if they are meant to be read aloud as well as on the page.’– Bruce King, Journal of Postcolonial Literature Here are poems that celebrate an expanding kinship: of passion and friendship, mythic quest and modern-day longing, in a world animated by dialogue and dissent, delirium and silence. Circling themes of intimacy and time, they return to the urgency of conversation: that fragile bridge across the frozen attitudes that divide our world. But at the heart of the collection is a deeper preoccupation, with those blurry places where humans might walk with gods, where the body might touch the beyond, where the enchanted might intersect effortlessly with the everyday. Where one stumbles upon what the poet simply calls ‘love without a story’.