Darling Girl / S. Niroshini

‘These poems unveil an exciting new voice. Niroshini is unafraid to climb the ladder of risk, swerving from the territory of girlhood to the pain of an underexamined past, gently excavating ancestral memory.’ Mona Arshi

‘I read Niroshini’s work, feeling like I’m centre stage about to watch everything unfold. I love how I was brought into history, lived experience and language. The skill in holding the reader, and allowing their imagination to latch on to the story.’ Yomi Ṣode

Everything begins with a kiss       at the plantation       and then a disrobing

Niroshini’s poems live at the intersection of beauty, history and violence. They embody the stillness within the maelstrom required to reclaim oneself from unlawful ownership, from colonial and gender-based trauma. We find ourselves on a rooftop in Colombo, in Neruda’s latrine, submerged in the waters of the Indian Ocean, and on the battlefield with Kali, imagined as a mother in conversation with her daughter. The voices contained within each tableau are tenderly devastating, entreating girls, like the gods, to call out their one thousand and eight names.

PAPERBACK    ISBN: 978-1-913268-17-6    PUBLISHED: 14TH MAY 2021