In Carolina Hotchandani’s debut The Book Eaters, the poet’s desire for agency over her life’s narrative is counterbalanced by her awareness that poetry is written precisely when life wrests control from us. This book, conceived in loss, examines shifts in identity due to Partition, immigration, illness, and birth. As roles evolve and dissolve, the poet witnesses the decay of language, artifacts, and history, yet these erasures are also generative: they beget poetic creation. The Book Eaters is a study in belonging as well—to our bodies, our memories, our stories, ourselves, our families, our cultures. Hotchandani’s poems interrogate what it means to be full or empty (of words, of the past, of another human being); they illuminate our inextricability from our creaturehood. Even as they explore unraveling—through the metaphor of insects that devour the very pages we produce—these poems are tightly woven into an exquisitely crafted, cohesive collection.
In your version of the story, people butter their fingers
with notions of God, splitting India into a smaller India,
a new Pakistan. The way a single roti’s dough
is pulled apart, the new spheres, rolled in the palms,
then flattened. The idea of God—the destroyer of human bonds,
you will say—the reason for new borders, new
pain to sprout on either side of a dividing line. You’ll go on.
I’ll picture the edges of your words blurring to a hum
as I think of how to wrest your rant from you.
A rolling pin barrels over dough, widens the soft disk,
makes it fine. You are fragile. Like a story that stretches
belief. Like a nation. Like a thin disk of dough that sticks
to a surface, tearing when it’s peeled back. I don’t know
how to part the story from the person and keep the person.
Listen to “Partition,” read by Carolina Hotchandani:
Listen to “Nesting,” read by Carolina Hotchandani: