The Grasp of Things

The title of Aishwarya Iyer’s debut collection, The Grasp of Things, gives the impression of something slight and elusive, but the poems themselves are fierce and unrelenting:

When waking cuts into my gut,
and crow-caws gash into my consciousness,
I think of you and build this day,
mole-like, by moment

The objects of Iyer’s focus are the concealed reaches of the mind, its torments and torsions. The events of this interior theater are played out (splayed out?), in Iyer’s poems, on the external surfaces of a city (“The torn tarpaulin of sudden-edged tin slums”). In “Endnote,” she writes:

I once saw you, hollowed out
by the fine cut of evening light
It was winter in the city then
and your window had no panes

Beside the half-drawn curtains
with your beady eyes and stick-limbs
you grew grotesque.
In the fading light I void
-ed my thoughts, while you
came closer: a child
greeted me with soft, stubby fingers.
 how I hated you and instantly then
became your mother […]

Every line is loaded to the brim, a dense inner life vying with a city on the edge of the macabre: “[Mornings and evenings are when the river’s up to brim and the street then drowns many, but now the bedrock has broken apart, scarabs crawl over the roads and carry me...].”

Iyer’s poems bear the mark of a sharp mind contemplating loss and living, leaning, at times, on absurd, over-the-top jokes to make a point:

Sense of flying in my mouth
I gulp it down and down
And I expand
like a poppy bulb in my throat
A full-throated promise
hinging its neck in my breath

The inward bent of this book creates a sense of intimacy, bringing the reader close to parse the workings of another person’s mind, which is set to rattle you:

—to be vacated from your name
Shin, bones, nails
The shreds walking separate paths
Unwilling to be housed in this hole;
The words are weary
Burning at the shaft, looking for ice —
Perhaps after the limit, will a sentence grow;