Sandalwood-Scented Skeletons by Rhea Dhanbhoora

 

When you enter Rhea Dhanbhoora‘s artfully composed universe of these twenty poems, you will find received forms like the pantoum, those in nonce forms, excellent prose poems, and one of my favorite sestinas of this century. You will know that you are experiencing a new master of observation, investigation, and mystery in her poetry. She knows when to be tender with an edge:

 

Silk scarf stinking of sandalwood

swaying pretty to

hide the smile on my odd face.

 

and when to be political:

 

it is not a country I have left behind, but a colony on the brink of extinction.

 

Dhanbhoora opens her collection with the line, “There are words people like me will hear that you don’t know” and takes us to a world “slipping in and out of global consciousness,” of “once-flushed fires,” of “a maladjusted minority struggling for space,” of “menacing warmth from the soughing of the wind,” “where invisible is better than seen,” where “some vulture carries memories through the sky in its belly.” When you read Rhea’s work, you must be ready to do as she asks, to “pick a place to watch the beginning of the end.” And you must be hungry because her words are truly “food, flowers, bodies — ready to be devoured.”

–Kevin Dublin, author of “How to Fall in Love in San Diego”

 

Thoughtful, soulful, beautiful, and thorough, Sandalwood-Scented Skeletons voices the diasporic existence of an ethnoreligious minoritized speaker. Rhea Dhanbhoora exhibits mastery of imagery with her rich references to the smells and textiles associated with Parsi Zoroastrian culture. From the funereal to the whimsical, Sandalwood-Scented Skeletons is a savory collection of poetry.
–DeMisty D. Bellinger, author of “Peculiar Heritage” and “Rubbing Elbows”

 

Rhea Dhanbhoora’s poetry sings with longing. Her delicate intertwining of gorgeous lyricism and raw storytelling paint vivid pictures of a world that is slipping away, and taking her identity with it. Dhanbhoora is a historian, an archeologist, a mourner—a collector of memories and images that stay with us long after we finish reading.
–Hannah Grieco, author of “So You Don’t Hear Me” (Summercamp Publishing, 2021)

 

Poems of longing and questioning, of identity, biology, home, charged as the ring around a flame.
–Ashley Mayne, author