Overview

In Every Elegy Is a Love Poem, Sneha Subramanian Kanta writes grief as an ecology of continuance, where a mother's death sets language moving through rain, roots, whale-song and the salt grammar of oceans. Built from un-elegies, invocations, fragments after Sappho, mythic and documentary textures, and a late epistolary sequence, the book keeps returning to water as both witness and archive, a medium that carries migration, inheritance, and the pressure of history without offering the comfort of resolution. Tamil, Hindi and English co-exist as lived strata rather than ornament, and the poems' lucid intensities move between domestic ritual, spiritual enquiry and climate unease with an exact, luminous music. What emerges is a formally varied, emotionally unsentimental work that understands devotion as attention, and love as the ongoing labour of naming what remains.

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9781917617604

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Reviews

Sneha Subramanian Kanta's Every Elegy Is a Love Poem is about loss, but more specifically, about how grief changes the integrity of all that it touches; the brain is altered, the muscles in the body adjust to grief's new and heavy presence. What makes this book's exploration of grief so striking is Kanta's careful eye, how she eloquently culls metaphors from the world around her. In her capable hands, grief is both a fire that ""transfers into another / and creates a row of lights from a single wick"" and a body of water. What do fire and water have in common? Whatever they touch never comes away the same. - Taylor Byas Reading Sneha Subramanian Kanta's Every Elegy Is a Love Poem is akin to peeling the fruit of memory, each layer a sweet seed of storytelling. Full of lush language, evocative lineation, and felt invocation, Every Elegy Is a Love Poem sings of love, grief, matrilineal connection, and language-making as ritual. Kanta's poems are expansive universes; each visceral image lingers in the landscape of tenderness: ""I remember to chant / the name of my mother / repeatedly like a bowstring of roses."" To ""un-elegy"" is to insist on dancing ""in the brass of sunlight,"" without end. - Jane Wong

Author Information

Born in Mumbai, Sneha Subramanian Kanta is an award-winning writer, academician, and editor. She is the 2025 Woodhaven Artist in Residence at The University of British Columbia Okanagan. She received a 2025 Civic Award of Recognition from the city of Mississauga and a 2025 Cultural Award from Heritage Mississauga. Her work has been anthologized widely including in The Penguin Book of Indian Poets. Her work has been recognized and supported by Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, The Charles Wallace Trust, The Vijay Nambisan Foundation, and British Council. She is an editor at Parentheses Journal.

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