Full Description
Aakriti Kuntal wields language like a blade and a balm, carving out poetry that is urgent and unafraid to ask what it means to exist.
What does it mean to exist within language—to shape it, and in turn, to be shaped by it? In Night breaks apart, like pomegranate seeds in my palm, Aakriti Kuntal crafts poems that unravel at the edges of self and myth, where language is neither home nor escape, but a threshold to something more elemental. Her verses move like water rolling and sifting through sediment, shifting between dream and flesh. Through intimate confessions and stark observations, she confronts the absurdity of suffering, the weight of the body, and the vast, unknowable machinery of the universe. Each poem resists easy meaning, instead offering raw honesty: language as both wound and salve.
For readers drawn to the introspective and the experimental, Kuntal's poetry echoes the emotional depth of Ocean Vuong and the intellectual play of Anne Carson. This collection is for those who seek poetry not as answers, but as an experience—visceral, and unafraid to press against the limits of being.
Contents
Bulb
Blink
Evening
Presence
Whirr
Choir
Ivory Spell
Lilith
Vines
Spurt
Vital Languages
A nameless treachery by the windowsill
My heart at sunrise
Lotus
Scab
An event in the neighbourhood
Through Time and Body
Stratospheric Seduction
Anatomy of death—in time
Abduction
Flagella
The Serpent
An Ordinary Stone
Sea
Name
The Trajectory of a Poem
Dear ''
City Drive
Tender Consonants
Synapse
Somnium
Concussion
A slit in time
Bipolar
Specks
Sorority
On Nightmares
The Constant
Disenchantment
The Last Celebration
The-garden-of-death
The-wrist-is-a-red-loop
How-many-deaths-make-a-dream?
The-body-is-a-red-exoskeleton
The-first-face-is-a-valentine-red
The-tongue-is-a-pink-cello
A-little-hope-is-a-red-thing
Dilemma-of-the-red-valves
Cytoplasm
A droplet of blood examines itself
The city of droplets
A red droplet eats the sky
Cactus
Artery
Hibiscus
Debt
Prayer
A gap in time
Crib
Hide-and-See
Flute
Currant
Origami Dream
Gong—song of life
Incense
Woodpecker
Revelation
Neelmohar in a sulphur sky
Fringe
