AERODYNAMICS by Gail Ghai

With the release of Aerodynamics, Gail Ghai has written an important collection of poems based on family members and family lives, who molded us into who we are today.

The one-page poems drawn from her (our?) lives, will resonate with readers immediately.  After reading Aerodynamics, I found myself recalling how relationships with fathers, mothers and siblings shape us into versions of ourselves. The poem “Dark Wings” in the book had me nodding at what I read.

In another poem, “What We Do For Our Children”, Ghai recalls a home “where kids, relations, and drifters / revolved like spent spokes…”

From strong women, to brothers and sisters and even a tipsy pet, her work is moving, honest and hopeful…among the best poetry collections I have read in a very long time.

–Michael Maul, Author, Dancing Naked in Front of Dogs, Breaking Cover, Birds Who Eat French Fries

The poems in Gail Ghai’s Aerodynamics are gentle, intelligent, and eloquent as they traverse an ancestry in images that place the reader inside the poet’s memory. Lyrical and graceful, we move through moments of a child flying, her “mother/ the left wing…father, / the right.” We sail in “blue darkness” for a “shrill thrilled exhilaration of lift.” And the poems do not shy away from “cancer claws” that take the pilot father “in a dark blue shroud” that “floats above a cloudy, white silk.”  Take off with these poems in their “scarlet lights, royal blue lights/ brighter than the gray runway,” and have a good ride.

–Andrena Zawinski, Poet and Fiction Author, Born Under the Influence—Poetry, Plumes & Other Flights of Fancy—Flash Fiction