Another Life

Medha Singh

I’m writing love on a servietteas mourners gather on a moundfor the disgraced dead, stillin grave-clothes underfoot—suddenly, slow pianos         singin air, the shifting earthmoving its cadavers to an achein the ocean. Here they are, rakes rebornas willows contorted into painsthey don’t recognize. Bad men become trees.The earth forgives them, as do I. They beginto give. The wicked also dreamof love. They know darkness overheadmeans night before and night behind, yet dropsof starlight have shot through this earth’s evening;overhead, gingkoes have flaredagainst sun. Evening over tarmac, eveningbeneath lorries, where dogs huddlefor warmth and for miles on endthe quiet noise of town, and at the endof the last mile, me, pouring this syrupon a napkin. Things I can’t say yet:Oh, pianos. Oh, love. How we beginto open, under black water.

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Medha Singh is a poet from Delhi, based in Edinburgh. She is a winner of the New Writers Award 2023 (Scottish Book Trust). Her work of translation I Will Bring My Time: Love Letters from S.H. Raza was published in 2020 through The Raza Foundation, in collaboration with Art Vadehra. Her poems appear in Irish Pages, Almost Island, 3:AM, The Dark Horse, Bad Lilies, Interpret, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Indian Quarterly, and The Robert Graves Review among numerous others.  Her work has been anthologized in Singing in the Dark (Penguin, 2020), The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (Hachette, 2021), Contemporary Indian Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi, 2020), Best Indian Poetry 2018 (RLFPA editions), Divining Dante (Recent Work Press, 2021), Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing (Red Hen Press, 2022); Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (Penguin Random House, 2022); The Best Asian Poetry (Kitaab, 2022). 

Medha was longlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts Awards (India) in 2019 and 2020. She took her MSc in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. Her work has been translated into Hindi, Spanish and French. She is editor-at-large at Pen and Anvil Press, Boston.

Medha Singh’s poems deal with grief, absence, love and loss, often engaging with the concrete and small as a funnel for the larger ideas that govern us. Her work relies on image and music more than movement and action, which is really a way of thinking of identity and place as rooted in one’s experience of language—the sounds inside the voice of your mother, the words on pages of school books—all have a way of affecting the internal music of our everyday experience. Quotidian and intimate, Afterbody speaks of what survives us: it is the body’s secret laid bare. Singh’s style is unashamedly modernist and blends deft wit with seriousness of purpose. She builds a primordial homeland from the shifting tectonic plates of memory and the spaces we occupy.

“Gorgeous, poignant, beautifully evocative and strange, masterfully subtle, yet poetically exhilarating….Afterbody will properly announce Singh as one of the most notable emerging poets in Scotland.”
—Alan Gillis

“Medha’s work is honed and stylistically assured and informed by the wide range of her reading across literature, cultural theory and philosophy. And yet, her poetry is never mannered and always, as Henri Cole says—as all good poetry must be—'dipped in the oil of human feeling.' Afterbody is stark, spiky, discursive, as Medha never allows grief in her poems to become an end in itself and instead triangulates grief as a battleground and elegy as a ruined field for self-interrogation and reckoning with the dead, and more than a site to simply erect a memorial.”
—Rohan Chhetri

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