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Akhil Katyal’s The Last Time I Saw You tells the story of how we encounter grief. It intimately lays out the poet’s experience of an event of loss and its aftermath. Tracing the moments from when the abyss unexpectedly opens to the gradual resurgence of the ordinary, these poems resonate with both raw and deeply considered emotion. What helps him move on is the deciduous forest of memories surrounding him, and an unlikely cast of people (an eighteenth-century warrior-princess, Ustad Bismillah Khan, a nineteenth-century naturalist, a mediaeval saint), animals (millipedes, bats, blue bulls) and objects (quartzite, pigeon feathers, envelopes). In the backdrop is a metropolis grappling with an unprecedented illness, the involuntary migration of its inhabitants, and the harrowing effects of a communal pogrom. With each word and line carefully poised and suffused with the spirit of human resilience, the poems in The Last Time I Saw You will linger with you long after you have read them.
Akhil Katyal is a writer, translator and scholar. He has published three books of poems: Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems (2020), How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross (2018) and Night Charge Extra (2015). He was a 2016 International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa International Writing Program and was awarded the Vijay Nambisan Poetry Fellowship in 2021. He translated Ravish Kumar?s Ishq Mein Shahar Hona as A City Happens in Love (2018). In 2020, he co-edited The World That Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia. His work has appeared in several pivotal anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets edited by Jeet Thayil.
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