“Ornament” and “A Century of Surnames for Witness”
“should you cast your eyes heavenward, / your body shrugs off the symmetry // of this shift in weather, and your name lifts to a hush / of mulberry trees;”
Kawita Kandpal
Kawita Kandpal is a queer, disabled, first-generation immigrant born in India. She has been published in North American Review, Puerto del Sol, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection Folding a River was published by Marick Press. As the daughter of scientists who left India on the eve of the Emergency, Kawita’s poems investigate the psychological impacts of political conflict on an Indian family seeking asylum in America. Her poems ebb and flow between continents as the speaker searches for solace and a still point to call home. Kawita calls home a hunting lodge in the Allegheny chain of the Appalachian Mountains with her wolfhounds.