In Piecemeal, Ahana Banerji inhabits the soft and the small: wrists, fists, and window frost, mustard seedand salmon scale. Her poetry lives inside the minute pressures of everyday life, inside the shudders andbruises of the human body. In paying careful attention to parts of the whole, Banerji's smallest gesturesbecome suddenly enormous. These are poems about fear and family, about love and language and hunger.Banerji moves through a variety of forms-villanelle, prose poem, 'bedtime story'-with a quiet rhythmicconfidence. And from within the glistening structures of the poems, we glimpse strange characters andconversations. There are mothers and daughters, gods and lobsters, Federico García Lorca and JoanDidion. At the heart of Piecemeal, though, is the speaker's promise to herself: 'I, too, will be / good. Good / as thejugular's perfect hyacinth'. It is an intensely vivid and hopeful promise from a powerful new voice inpoetry.
