# Arriving Shortly

- Link: https://writersworkshopindia.com/2015/07/19/arriving-shortly/
- Published: 2015-07-19T19:30:18+00:00
- Author: admin

5/5 - (2 votes)

**Author:** K. Srilata
 **Pages:** 96 **Year of Publication:** 2011 **Price:** Rs
200 **ISBN:** 978-93-5045-015-4 (9789350450154)

_**About the Author**_
 An award-winning poet, fiction writer and translator, K.
Srilata is Associate Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social
Sciences, IIT Madras. Her books include _The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing
Self-Respect History_ (Zubaan/Kali for Women, 2003), _Short Fiction from South India_(
co-edited with Subashree Krishnaswamy and published by OUP in 2007), _Rapids of 
a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry_ (co-edited with Lakshmi Holmstrom
and Subashree Krishnaswamy and published in 2009 by Penguin/Viking India) and an
anthology of poetry titled _Seablue Child_ (Brown Critique, Kolkata, 2000). Srilata
was a Charles Wallace writer-in-residence at the University of Stirling, Scotland
in 2010. She was also a Sangam house writer-in-residence. Her work has been featured
in journals and anthologies such as _Fulcrum_, _The Little Magazine_, _Kavya Bharati_
and _**The Poetry Chain Anthology: A New Book of Indian Poems in English**_ (published
by **Writers Workshop**). Her reviews have appeared in _The Hindu_’s “Literary Review”
as well as in _The Indian Review of Books_.

_**Teaser**_

_For Jeanne Mukuninwa_

This, my friend, is the question I have:
 Just what can you bake into a poem? Sky
blue skies, bouncy clouds of cotton, vanilla milk-shake moons, red-breasted robins
and other creatures with wings that visit you on mornings choked with the emptiness
of work and lines from forgotten sources: _the sea rising in a whisper of piano 
notes…_ These things and others are easy. Their batter flows freely into the moulds
of lyrics, sonnets and free verse. But what of Jeanne Mukuninwa who slid off sky
blue skies and clouds of cotton and milk-shake moons when she was raped over and
over by soldiers till inside her fistulas erupted, till she stopped noticing red-
breasted robins and other creatures with wings, stopped wishing for seas rising 
in whispers of piano notes? There must be a way, surely, of baking fistulas into
a poem? Of gathering body wastes and pouring them into moulds newly created, so 
other worlds can rise?

Note: Jeanne Mukuninwa is one of many Congolese war-crime victims.

_**Contents**_
 61 poems spread over 7 sections