Burning like Her Own Planet

Vandana Khanna’s third book charts a course from naïve quiescence to the fiery self-belief of a shape-shifting female speaker, sometimes contemporary, sometimes guised as the wifely goddesses Sita or Parvati. Early on, a girl “in tone-deaf / gold” with “lotus-petal / eyes” enters “a forest on fire,” but soon enough, she bids a tiger “to come and lick my ankles free of ash.” The conflagration that threatened to consume her instead fuels an awakening.

As Burning like Her Own Planet progresses, a more seasoned voice begins to displace the ingenue eager to please:

You aren’t like you used to be—hate the boy
who builds the world without you, who calls
you a goddess, woos you out of the jungle
then treats you like the second flower he sees.

The book is redolent of saffron, cinders, and wet grass. Each glass-clear metaphor sparkles. Khanna gives us a “red-bride mouth,” the “black tinsel” of a woman’s hair, “gold ringing / at my ankles,” and “a blue-skinned flirt” of a Hindu god (Krishna).

For all the technicolor jangle of these poems, the widow’s white might be the most arresting color, as when Khanna writes:

You smell the heartache on my skin
like an old burn, want to break me
in half to find that jungle flushed
with green you lost me in, so you can
burn all the red out, turn me to white

Later, the speaker observes: “After all my wildness turned to white, only / a little bit of me wanted to be saved.” White is intended to unsex a widow by rendering her plain, yet this setting down of the gendered life, captured in what Khanna calls the “bone-white sari wrung free / of this world,” shines with transcendence.