Poet Leela Raj-Sankar begins her debut collection, Heat Death of the Universe (2023, fifth wheel press), with an incantation titled “YOU ARE HERE.” Within this frame for the poems that follow, Raj-Sankar’s authoritative speaker orients the reader to the body as a site of possibility: “You are here. / You are home. This is a door. This is / a handle. This is you / walking through.” This direct invitation to awareness and action later accrues the undertones of warning, when the speaker adds: “this is how we will live each day for the / rest of our lives.” In my close reading and review of this and the 18 poems that follow, I will attempt to connect Raj-Sankar’s dots, in which she establishes the body as a site of encounter: not only with language, but also with the beginnings of sensory input and awareness—with an extra- or co-linguistic mode of cognition, if you will. Using this embodied awareness as a poetic sieve, Raj-Sankar explores how the corporeal self exists in a shared world that is too often sick, translated, and fractured. She deftly maps experiences from her own life onto the page: to investigate the dialectic between experience and language; to illuminate how illness defines & is defined by the body; and to explore how questions of heritage, language, & identity complicate our lives. When considering the various excursions in form collected across these pages from a craft perspective, the sum total establishes Raj-Sankar as a wordsmith at the beginning of a life in language to be excited about—all the more so considering that, at the time the book was written, she had not yet graduated from high school.

Raj-Sankar’s meditations on beginning in the body recur throughout the collection. Perhaps her most direct treatment of the subject comes in “CACTUS WREN,” a lyrical and genre-blurring prose poem that uses the mid-line slash, or vestibule, as its most frequent punctuation mark, when she writes: “I am someone different / each morning / I am endlessly splintered in the act / of leaving myself behind.” The hazy quality of relationships to distinct self-identities generated, inhabited, and lost by a voluntary act of self-alteration is referenced again in “WASTING DISEASE,” when Raj-Sankar writes, “I’m getting good at making and unmaking myself— / I become an exit wound with no place of entry.” Whether splintering or piercing the body, Raj-Sankar’s metaphors remind us that “the act of leaving myself behind” is a choice, a practice—a skilled coordination in time, sufficiently difficult such that one can notice “getting good at [it].” Later, the long poem “FANTASIA” uses negative space while directly addressing the reader, revealing that “the secret is just this:       our bodies preserved      in amber, now, / forever.” Letting the eye linger on “our bodies preserved,” before snapping the reader’s attention from “now” to “forever” across the break, prompts toward the inner coordination that readers may practice in ordre to grasp that tenuous perspective outside of narrative and schema—that body outside of the ‘I’ of language—that tentative decoupling of lived experience from before and after, so that now might be understood on its own terms.

Raj-Sankar’s concern with decoupling experience from contiguous narrative, in favor of the body’s eternally beginning present, leads (perhaps inevitably) to the dialectic between language and experience. Noting in the poem “SOLSTICE EULOGY (NEGATIVE DIALECTICS)” that “memory gilds everything with a fine hand,” Raj-Sankar complicates memory’s delimiting role in shaping narratives, complicating the truth and limits of those narratives themselves, when she writes,

“This is the catch: you are a pale imitation of the self in your memory, unable to summon words to describe it, the feeling of bursting to the surface of a creek smothered in daylight. Across the distance of years everything makes sense. The body is stitched together. It holds itself upright. It rotates around the correct axis. It lives with an unabashed fearlessness you can only dream of.”

The “stitched together” body and its “unabashed fearlessness,” something that the conscious mind cannot parse (but rather, “only dream of”), is positioned as a kind of extra- or supra-linguistic entity: a “feeling of bursting” for which the second-person addressee is “unable to summon words.” Raj-Sankar’s conception is of a body that “holds itself upright” in order to rotate correctly. In context, I read this passage as an indication that there are glimmers of embodied experience beyond, behind, or otherwise distinct from linguistic perception. A body does not need language to be structured: rather, it has a form and content all its own. 

Other poems in the collection trace the same thread of interrogation when it comes to the roles of language and the body in processing, storing, and enacting memories. In “HEATWAVE LOCKJAW,” the speaker likens “your fingers tracing across my / knuckles” to “a new memory, / a new song.” The salient points of memory here are feeling and sound, rather than words and sentences. Indeed, at the end of “...(NEGATIVE DIALECTICS),” the speaker notes that engaging the body in this way “turns you into a stranger, a litany of silence on your lips.” Raj-Sankar’s word choice here—“stranger”—might be read merely as a personal artifact, a fiction in service of ecstatic truth. However, later on in the poem “WASTING DISEASE,” the speaker takes up a similar, yet ultimately broader, claim: “no one knows anything about the body except how / to make it look clean. Palatable. No one knows anything / about the body except how to make it get down on its knees and pray.” Here, the salient points of experience are the two “exceptions” in play—the only two things anyone knows about the body—the realm of the senses (the palate) and the realm of numinous connection (prayer). Language may be viewed as an instrument or assistant at best, and a duplicitous source of false representation at worst, in each of these realms. Indeed, Raj-Sankar does address language directly in “...(NEGATIVE DIALECTICS),” when she writes “every language has / become one of loss, your own voice suddenly tremulous and unsure.” The loss she references here  is a dulling of perception beyond the boundaries of what is defined by language. Especially in terms of such uneven terrain as the senses or the spiritual (are they really so different?), I would argue that language’s dulling effect on our ability to perceive the true world around us can be insidious and profound. 

In the course of this excursion into naming, knowing, and representing the embodied dialectic between language and experience, Raj-Sankar explores several specific vectors by which the body’s extra- or para-linguistic aspects may complicate, inform, or otherwise influence our language choices. Before concluding, I will highlight briefly three powerful themes that arc through the collection: illness, race, and native language fluency.

Raj-Sankar approaches illness as one specific feature that may compel us to begin in the body. In “HIGH TIDE IN A LANDLOCKED STATE,” the speaker observes that, “sickness, / like drowning, can only be likened to itself.” Then, in “DUST STORM,” Raj-Sankar writes, “I don’t know how to explain the genesis of a wound / without breaking open the stitches.” Both lines point towards an embodied experience of illness that resists language and communication—often to the detriment of the sufferer, whose pain is untranslatable and unknowable. In the spirit of such projects as Olney Magazine’s anthology, Reformatting the Pain Scale, Raj-Sankar’s text does make attempts to represent this experience using figurative language. In “...LANDLOCKED STATE,” for example, Raj-Sankar deploys careful word choice when detailing a medical experience of the body: “I lay there, disconnected, / insensible, alone, a brain trapped in a body trapped in an endless lurching / dance of sickness.” Other poems expand further on this theme, and I won’t steal any more thunder here. However, I would note that readers intrigued by such descriptions will find Raj-Sankar in good company with fellow fifth wheel press author MN James’ collection, Pantoum Stress Disorder.

Similarly to illness, Raj-Sankar approaches race as another feature of the body that will quickly draw theorizing back to reality: to the way race is intertwined in narratives of the body, of heritage and identity, and also of history and empire. Or, as Raj-Sankar aptly says with the use of negative space, in “FANTASIA”: 

“Not everything is about race                                                                                       until 

it is.”

Racism, colorism, caste, and other historical iterations of language designed to divide the human tree, according to appearance and prejudice, all cast heavy shadows on our shared language, even today. Readers may be familiar, for example, with the issue of “master” and “slave” hard drives in computer engineering, or the implicit associations present with simple binaries like “white” and “black.” In Heat Death of the Universe, a detailed series of personal vignettes on this theme are interwoven in a majority of the poems in the text.

Most striking to my reading on this theme was a pair of passages: First, another from the long poem, “FANTASIA,” when Raj-Sankar writes

“My own brownness feels        unnatural, / like it belongs                                                

on         someone else. I am someone’s good / American 

daughter, obediently      and perfunctorily celebratory of all 

the right / holidays.”

Second, in “WASTING DISEASE,” when she returns to the motif of brown bodies, writing “I want to find a home where all / brown bodies know how to do is / grow. I want to open my eyes and realize that it isn’t unattainable.” For the purpose of this essay’s argument, what’s notable to me is the final sentence, in which the figure of the speaker’s eyes being opened can be read as a metaphor for escaping the inherited limits of language. In this text, what “isn’t unattainable” is a safe, nurturing space for brown bodies; Raj-Sankar’s verse reminds the reader that any barriers to such a world are socially constructed, rather than natural and infallible. We often look to public or legalistic shifts in language—such as Brown v. Board of Education, Loving v. Virgina, #MeToo, Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, or the latest discourse around “weird”—as examples of change. Raj-Sankar’s verse reminds the reader that this politics of enactment, of radical possibility, of beginning in one’s body and fulfilling its basic needs—on their own terms—is also part of navigating and naming our daily lives.

Finally, I would be remiss not to highlight Raj-Sankar’s focus on language fluency and identity as a marker of the body. Several poems take up the theme from varying points of view. In “SECOND GENERATION ANTI-LOVE LETTER,” for example, the speaker asserts a right of self-definition by stating, “what I am trying to say is / I need you to learn to pronounce my name.” At other times, the speaker’s role on the outside of a given speech community is literally pronounced: at different points in “FANTASIA,” vowel pronunciation marks the speaker as an outsider from one community (“at the Indian store I sound out the words in my mouth      the vowels always a little / off,”), while consonant pronunciation marks the speaker as an outsider from another (“White boys find me more exhausting than exotic; / I find myself intolerable. I never unlearned / those consonants, d for t,     always too      harsh”). Readers will be able to draw parallels to similar treatments of language as primarily a spoken artifact—a culturally informed production of the lips, tongue, glottis, teeth, and breath—by authors such as Zaffar Kunial, whose poem “Foxglove Country” directly addresses the speech production of the “xgl” in the middle of “foxglove,” four adjacent consonant sounds (/k/ /s/ /g/ /l/), whose difficult and culturally dependent pronunciation marks bodies as belonging to one group or another. Although I claim no literary or cultural expertise on diasporic communities and the language markers involved in code switching into and out of different identity groups, from a linguistic perspective (more relevant to my professional role as a reading and language teacher), I recommend Raj-Sankar’s own personal micro-survey as a welcome contribution for the way its supporting details include specific, relevant units of language analysis, e.g. phonemes, morphemes, and vocabulary.

Taken as a whole project, the collected logic of these poems acknowledges and gestures towards the limits of language—the slippages or ruptures between language and corresponding experience (or lack thereof). Key to this poetic project is the powerful role the body can play in orienting our experiences outside of those limits: in helping us to see, feel, hear, or otherwise register at a sensory level the rare and fleeting moments of the everyday, and to later translate those experiences to imperfect words on the page. Beginning in the body, in the sense that I gather from Raj-Sankar’s verse, means being true to our stories and the manner of their telling. It means letting our stories find their purchase in a web of inherited language, and in many cases, it becomes a way of interrogating power by showing us exactly where new language is needed—where existing power structures need to be modified, carved out, or dismantled—in order to honor those stories. By radical possibility of choice, I am talking about real decisions and consequences, large and small alike, that are influenced by the language we use to weigh and enact them. Large, such as the student-led protests in Bangladesh just this summer in August, 2024, in which bodies able to articulate and share revolutionary spirit led to collective action and change. Small, such as the gentle tug of an adolescent masculinity away from hard misogyny and towards something soft, in which willingness to follow the body beyond language—beyond norms, stigmas, associations, and other inherited ways of perceiving the world—allows the self to articulate a new identity.  

Sarah Ghazal Ali, in a Virtual Craft Chat hosted by Poet Lore and The Writer’s Center, noted a series of connections with which I thought it fitting to close. Ali spoke on how life is mediated through the body—and how in that respect, form is the body of the poem—and how in that respect, the content is inseparable from the form, much like our bodies and our stories. Quite powerful to consider, I think, and it brings us squarely back to the topic of form. Raj-Sankar’s collection of verse includes a range of forms and approaches to representing the body’s encounter—traditional lines and punctuation; prose blocks; mid-line slashes; negative space; sectional works; dialogue—each more or less ergonomic to particular representations of embodied experience. The sum total is an exciting selection of work from a promising young writer, sculpting new footholds in the morass of language, which I heartily encourage any reader who has made it this far to seek out and enjoy for themselves. The book is available online at www.fifthwheelpress.com.