When I Reach for Your Pulse (Stahlecker Selections) - Softcover

Vyas, Rushi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1954245548 ISBN 13: 9781954245549

Publisher: Four Way Books, 2023

Synopsis

In this electrifying debut, lyric works to untangle slippery personal and political histories in the wake of a parent's suicide. "When my father finally / died," Vyas writes, "we [...] burned, / like an effigy, the voiceless body." Grief returns us to elemental silence, where "the wind is a muted vowel in the brush of pine / branches" across American landscapes. These poems extend formal experimentation, caesurae, and enjambment to reach into the emptiness and fractures that remain. This language listens as much as it sings, asking: can we recover from the muting effects of British colonialism, American imperialism, patriarchy, and caste hierarchies? Which cultural legacies do we release in order to heal? Which do we keep alive, and which keep us alive? A monument to yesterday and a missive to tomorrow, When I Reach for Your Pulse reminds us of both the burden and the promise of inheritance. "[T]he wail outlasts / the dream," but time falls like water and so "the stream survives its source."

About this title

About the Author

Rushi Vyas was born in Toledo, Ohio. He is co-author of the chapbook Between Us, Not Half a Saint (GASHER Press, 2021) with Rajiv Mohabir, and his poem "Morning Chant: Scatter" was republished as a broadside by the Center for Book Arts. He earned his MFA from the University of Colorado-Boulder and his BS from the University of Michigan. His poems have been published in Adroit Journal, The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, Landfall (NZ), The Offing, The Spinoff (NZ), Tin House, and elsewhere. He has worked as a career counselor, curriculum developer, editor, and facilitator. In 2019, Rushi moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Ōtepoti Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand, where he currently lives, writes, and teaches.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Effigy

I waited all my life for my father
to die and when he finally did I heard
the whip of voices caged within
his skull. In the neighborhood, maple
branches sprawled into each other, each
trunk an asthmatic wheeze summiting
the snake line, each limb heaving
into the next. A pattern ripples through
the absence of whom we scatter. I heard
my own pulse shelled by inheritance, felt
the stubborn flesh of a neck that snapped
its own beat. Outside, when people celebrate
the terrorist’s death in the streets, I do not
leave my house. When my father finally
died, we cut him from the ceiling, fed him
sweets, dipped him in oil, and burned,
like an effigy, the voiceless body

Edition details

• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1954245548
• ISBN 13: 9781954245549
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 124