Book Eaters

the long version

"In Carolina Hotchandani's debut The Book Eaters, the poet's desire for agency over her life's narrative is counterbalanced by her awareness that poetry is written precisely when life wrests control from us. This book, conceived in loss, examines shifts in identity due to Partition, immigration, illness, and birth. As roles evolve and dissolve, the poet witnesses the decay of language, artifacts, and history, yet these erasures are also generative: they beget poetic creation. The Book Eaters is a study in belonging as well-to our bodies, our memories, our stories, ourselves, our families, our cultures. Hotchandani's poems interrogate what it means to be full or empty (of words, of the past, of another human being); they illuminate our inextricability from our creaturehood. Even as they explore unraveling-through the metaphor of insects that devour the very pages we produce-these poems are tightly woven into an exquisitely crafted, cohesive collection"--