A mouthful of sky - April 2022
Released by Get Fresh Books, LLC , ‘A mouthful of sky’, is a labor of love. What started out as a rough manuscript evolved into something far beyond my imagination. Spurred on by flashes of creativity, both while here and during my visits to India, and thanks to the inputs from my professors and fellow poets, and good wishes from my friends and family, many poems from this book have found homes in various journals and anthologies. If you wish to purchase the book, you may do so HERE! Support small, independent presses!
Also, read Kusi Okamura’s review of my book HERE on The Wild Word.
Praise for ‘A Mouthful of Sky’
In Anu Mahadev's A Mouthful of Sky, sensual and sexual pleasures, joys, and freedoms are woven together with gendered inequities, misogyny, and cruelty. The narrator is exceedingly matter-of-factly vulnerable and courageous as she shows the complexities, contradictions, cruelties, and depths of this relationship with complete self-acceptance. With a solid certainty in spite of circumstances. And with forthright insistence of her own pleasure. But it's never simple. Mahadev's voice is like none I've ever heard--complex, often heartbreaking, strong, and forthright into her lyricism.
Sarah Vap, author of Winter: Effulgences and Devotions
"I've heard that love sets you free?" Anu Mahadev asks in her poetry debut, transforming a common proverb into a disconcerting query. A Mouthful of Sky is a collection of questions, bridging the distance between the trauma of a manipulative relationship and the passion of clandestine love. These are poems of resilience, converging confidence and doubt, freedom and entrapment: the "desperate alphabet" of a "disposable heart." Fraught with sexuality and distress, dualities mirror and split throughout these poems of hunger, ravishment, and, ultimately, discovery: "the code is love. the code is legs. spread the code." Equally sultry and vulnerable, a mouthful of sky embodies the complications, possibilities, and physicality of love, examining and the myriad of ways the body can truly be set free.
Stacey Balkun, author of Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere
Neem Leaves - January 2015
I rode an emotional wave writing this book as a cathartic outlet to express my grief and anguish upon the aftermath of my mother-in-law’s passing after a painful struggle with cancer. Primarily written to help me cope with this tragic loss, I also interspersed in moments of love and beauty with poems ranging from the mundane to the exotic, from the everyday aspects of life, to memories of my childhood and youth in India, to my passion for traveling and nature.
It is available on Amazon HERE.
Myriad - January 2013
My first time attempt to launch as a poet began with this book, and little did I know then how much more there is to learn, and how much more evolution would follow, as a poet and a person both. Available on Amazon HERE.