Trespassing My Ancestral Lands by Kalpna Singh-Chitnis

 

“Trespassing My Ancestral Lands” captures the poet’s eye roving the landscapes to see and discover the many layers of self in a multi-layered world of family, nature, and cycles of life. Kalpna Singh-Chitnis’ voice is a hypnotic opera of cautionary tales. These heart-wrenching poems burn and sing to understand the primordial codes and rituals we depend on to give our lives meaning: “Mothers fold sorrows like laundry. An astute observer of the smallest details, she grips us with the travails of having feet firmly planted on both sides of the worlds and cultures: “School desks were chipped/into kindling.” This brave poet walks the precipice and captures the testimonials of human grief, the dangers of love, loss, and war. Singh-Chitnis creates a voluminous experience of color and imagery rendering the mystical traditions and the hope in chaos. Kalpna-Singh Chitnis blows the shofar and shows how the power of language and story can lift us from despair, to reclaim our passions and our ghosts, the only way poetry can. This collection is indelible, you will come back again and again to a Motherland of wisdom—a talisman and guide to living with the fullest of fire and breath.

–Cynthia Atkins, author of “Still-Life with God.”

 

Reader, if what you seek is an illusion, phantoms and figments of imagination written in fleeting, figurative language, then move on. Seeker, if what you wish to read is real, fleshed-out through direct, honorable verses which linger without pretentiousness, then don’t pass by this book. “If you are a woman,” Ms. Singh-Chitnis sings, “tell my story to your sons. If you are a man, tell it to your daughters. If you are a preacher, teach it as a sermon to the believers.” Here is a Human Being speaking equally to all other Human Beings, one who “trespasses,” too, across limitations of gender, ethnicity, nationality; whose story thus becomes a story worth telling, and retelling, and retelling again. For in the poem, “The Salt of a Woman,” as she writes so sublimely, “Her story is much older than her civilization…” The story found in “Trespassing My Ancestral Lands,” is in fact as old as Creation itself.

–Jennifer Reeser, author of “Indigenous” and “Strong Feather.”

 

I would like to stand on street corners asking people to read “Trespassing My Ancestral Lands.” The enduring necessity of this collection of poetry far exceeds the ordinary every day and as such, I would wish it to be widely shared. Very infrequently, in my role as editor, I come across a collection that blows me away. Figuratively, literally, and spiritually. Singh-Chitnis is a deeply modern writer, who dips her pen in ancient history and acknowledgment of what came before us. She blends these disparate worlds together in such a way we learn and grow with each insight. This is the sheer essence of a poet, to be both translator and third-eye for the reader. When we are unable to articulate our feelings, the poet can. Singh-Chitnis has an uncanny canary-in-a-coalmine prescience that feels at times like she’s reading our minds. If a poet cannot speak for her readers, she’s stuck in a confessional style that grows dusty with time. To stay alive long after her physical form has passed, she must transcend time and space and be the mouthpiece for our deepest fears and joys. I would go as far as saying if you don’t like poetry, you might well be converted by this poetry because it’s poetry, and it’s more than poetry. She will be a poet we talk about in two hundred years. Her name won’t simply be synonymous with good writing, it will be a legacy.

–Candice Louisa Daquin, Senior Editor / Indie Blu(e) Publishing and author of “Tainted by the Same Counterfeit” among others.

 

Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is not looking for bystanders or onlookers to her powerful poems of personal journey. What she is looking for is a companion and to that end she uses her skill as a poet to draw the reader ever closer, so close at times that we hear her heart beating within these compelling narrative poems. Her fine writing holds a clarity that shows both how some distances can bring us near and how only words sometimes keep us apart. I think any reader that joins Kalpna Singh-Chitnis on her journey of memory and self-reflection will find themselves inwardly rewarded without measure.

–Beau Beausoleil, author of “Concealed in Language” and “Another Way Home.”

 

An unforgettable poetry collection for the soul it seeks and lays bare, and one that embraces and urges the reader to rise and perceive life in distinctive and myriad ways. As a true poet, Kalpna Singh-Chitnis finds poetry in everything, particularly in vocalizing immigrant experiences, loss of native identity, and the duality of the diasporic scaffold. She further fuses these vividly within the framework of the past, present, and future, thereby creating breathtaking edifices of life and memorializing our existence. Nostradamus-like, her poetry in turn signals our future as well. Singh-Chitnis’s historical, cultural, confessional, and observational views and words leave us probing, enriched, and satiated.”

–Anita Nahal, writer, and professor; author of drenched thoughts (novel) and poetry collections, “Kisses at the espresso bar” & “What’s wrong with us
Kali women?” among others.

 

Kalpna Singh-Chitnis writes poems with quiet urgency, poems highlighting and condemning violence and social persecution perpetrated against women, against immigrants, against anyone who has lost a homeland. But don’t expect rhetoric and abstraction here; rather, find intimate poems addressed to all of us, like letters hand-written with the language of loss: “What have I lost to deserve the beauty around me,” Singh-Chitnis asks, and there is no answer outright, but glimpses of one whose broken wings will stretch for a lifetime.

–Octavio Quintanilla, author of the poetry collection, “If I Go Missing” (Slough Press) and “The Book of Wounded Sparrows” (Texas Review Press).