Women in the Waiting Room

Women in the Waiting Room explores the twin forces of silence and speech. It sketches a room full of women—friends and strangers, humans and goddesses—retuning from the far edges of experience to find a voice. This fierce, haunting collection asks: in the face of violence or illness, when body and self reach their limit, how can we find a way to speak? Myth tangles with memory, ghazals rub shoulders with inventive fragmentary forms, forging a shape for what feels impossible to say. By way of call and response, echo and reverberation, the many voices of this book create a defiant chorus.  In Women in the Waiting Room, Kapur has fashioned poems that speak to our era, rising from pain, moving through silence and into song.

Women in the Waiting Room was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and is available from Black Lawrence Press.

Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist

Kirun Kapur's debut volume, Visiting Indira Gandhi's Palmist, ricochets from Partition-era India to Biblical pastorals, from American bars to the battlefield of the Bhagavad-Gita.  By turns lyrical and narrative, unflinching and funny, the collection examines the harrowing collision of love and violence as it arises in families and nations. In these intense, beautiful poems, Kapur introduces us to an astonishing range of characters—mothers and fathers, princes and soldiers, lovers and daughters—as she sets out to explore our most fundamental stories and our most enduring human bonds.

Visiting Indira Gandhi's Palmist won the Antivenom Poetry Award and was published by Elixir Press in January of 2015. It is available through Amazon.com here.