The Last Time I Saw You : Poems

A maverick you will adore' - GEETANJALI SHREEAkhil Katyal's The Last Time I Saw You tells the story of how we encounter grief- It intimately lays out the poet's experience of an event of loss and its aftermath- Tracing the moments from when the abyss unexpectedly opens to the gradual resurgence of the ordinary these poems resonate with both raw and deeply considered emotion-What helps him move on is the deciduous forest of memories surrounding him and an unlikely cast of people (an eighteenth-century warrior-princess Ustad Bismillah Khan a nineteenth-century naturalist a mediaeval saint) animals (millipedes bats blue bulls) and objects (quartzite pigeon feathers envelopes)- In the backdrop is a metropolis grappling with an unprecedented illness the involuntary migration of its inhabitants and the harrowing effects of a communal pogrom-With each word and line carefully poised and suffused with the spirit of human resilience the poems in The Last Time I Saw You will linger with you long after you have read them-