Praise for Afterbody


"It is a blood-soaked book: indeed a sequence 'Viscera: Blood fragments, was, with 'Painting Our Time', one of the two I re-read the most. There are moments of eroticism and quiet epiphany, but the major trajectory is learning to love against the bloodiness." -- Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman 

" Medha Singh’s Afterbody does not merely collect poems; it enacts a philosophy of being and nonbeing, of the body as residue, apparition, and event. To read these poems is to linger in the thresholds where memory brushes against oblivion, where love leaks into death, where the singular tremor of touch opens into the seismic tremor of history. Its arc is not progression but persistence. From first dusk to last fragment, what remains is, again, the soft disaster of endurance, the residue of contact, the ache of breath. To read Afterbody is to experience poetry as philosophy’s double. Where concepts collapse, images remain. Where phenomenology reaches its limit, lyric breath goes on. Singh has written a work that demands to be read not only as poetry but as ontology—a cartography of absence, an archive of spectral touch, a hymn to the impossible intimacy between being and its after." -- Christina Tudor-Sideri in Socrates on the Beach

"...throughout the collection the speaker constantly struggles to make sense of what she sees, feels, and experiences. She compares these sensations with those from the past and tries to imagine what the future may look like for both herself and for the places in which she lives. This unceasing, restless struggle not only makes Singh’s poetry in Afterbody vital, alive, and resonant but also makes readers look forward to what she will do next."   -- Chinmaya Lal Thakur in Gutter

 

"Besides Dante, the poet’s father emerges as a central figure in this collection: “Father, first / man, now a scent I can’t bear.” The father’s presence and “Afterbody” permeates many of these poems, where Singh doesn’t attempt to escape her family history so much as mine her past for rich poetic material, turning it up for the reader to see, revealing herself and the reader’s humanity at once.

Afterbody is a powerful and powerfully sustained collection that interrogates the present by examining the past."
-- Stephan Delbos for B O D Y Literature

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