The View From Zero Bridge

"Lynn Aarti Chandhok's first book offers a notably mature voice, elegiac but affirmative. Shuttling between Kashmir and Brooklyn, these well-wrought poems tell truths about both loss and gain. With more than verbal dexterity—with a sense of a deeper formal rightness—Chandhok finds each poem's natural shape. "Inside the Carpet Factory" makes a little prayer rug of a sonnet from its silken lines. In "Phul Chunan," the marigolds that accompany human ashes down a river are "bright/ like grace notes on the currents"—much as this poet's words are cast into the world by a light and graceful hand."
— Mary Jo Salter

The View from Zero Bridge won the 2006 Philip Levine Prize and is now available from Anhinga Press.

© 2024 Lynn Chandhok