Kali, in Conversation - A Collection of 30 Prose Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9789358961799)

This poetry collection reimagines Kali not as a distant deity, but as a living metaphor for women's rage, courage, and clarity in the face of violence and erasure. Drawing on decades of work alongside survivors of war, forced displacement, and conflict-related sexual violence, the poems position Kali as both witness and weapon; a language through which unspeakable experiences find form. Kali's many arms, tongue, and eyes become symbolic extensions of women's fractured and multiplied selves: bodies marked by survival, memory, and resistance. Across the collection, Kali's political journey unfolds alongside the lived realities of women navigating occupation, exile, poverty, and systemic injustice. She is invoked not as myth alone, but as archive: carrying the histories that states suppress and conflicts attempt to erase. The poems move between intimate bodily landscapes and collective histories, foregrounding rage not as destruction, but as a necessary ethical response to injustice. In this work, anger becomes a source of discernment; grief becomes testimony; courage becomes an act of reclamation. Kali's fearlessness mirrors the resilience of survivors who refuse silence, transforming trauma into presence and memory into power. Situated at the intersection of art and activism, the collection challenges dominant narratives that sanitise suffering or demand forgiveness without justice. Instead, it insists on accountability, dignity, and the right of women to name violence on their own terms. Kali's mythology is reworked through contemporary political realities, offering a feminist re-reading that centres survivors' voices and agency. Ultimately, this book is an invocation of truth, of remembrance, and of justice. Through Kali's imagery, the poems bear witness to pain while affirming the possibility of transformation. They ask what it means to survive with integrity, to remember without submission, and to imagine a world shaped not by fear, but by fierce, unapologetic life.

Author: Mahi Ramakrishnan
ISBN-10: 9358961791
ISBN-13: 9789358961799
Publisher: Zorba Books Pvt Ltd
Language: English
Published: 03/02/2026
Pages: 114
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.31lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.27d