HELIOTROPIA (BRICK BOOKS, 2024)
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“Where fear collides with the little shield of love.”
Manahil Bandukwala’s second collection of poems is a meditation on love during times of social and political upheaval. As a sunflower’s growth reaches toward the sun, so, she suggests, is a lover’s growth compelled by the gravitational pull and soul-light of their beloved. Many of these poems are in conversation with other poets and artists, creating a lineage of call and response. Against a backdrop of terrestrial crisis, come, spend your precious minutes in love’s Heliotropia, where we are magnetized by the unfathomable dark matter of another person, and know ourselves as celestial bodies flowering in spacetime, together. Winner of the 2025 Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry Shortlisted for the 2025 Ottawa Book Award Shortlisted for the 2025 Pat Lowther Award Shortlisted for the 2025 Raymond Souster Award |
Advanced Praise
“Manahil Bandukwala’s poems are curious, heartfelt, joy-filled expeditions: through rainstorms and supernovas, alternate realities and past lives, or sometimes simply through the park on a walk with a dear friend. Intergalactic yet deeply earthly, intertextual yet wonderfully original, Heliotropia is a place ‘where fear collides / with the little shield of love’ — and love prevails.”
— Mikko Harvey, author of Let the World Have You
“Like a daylily’s petals turn to the sun, so Manahil Bandukwala’s lyric angles against all odds to face the fervid beloved. Through archives of space and scripture, music and made magic, Heliotropia offers a threshold for the reader, a portal — to step over and through is to embark on a spiritual journey into love’s fathomless matrices. In intertextual poems as cosmic as they are botanic and tactile, Bandukwala invites readers to surrender to intimacy. ‘Love is worth loving,’ we are reminded, and against all odds, alternative endings, or origins, ‘the best is what we have.’ Here is a collection that grounds and glorifies, every invocation at once a flame, a sun, a psalm.”
— Sarah Ghazal Ali, author of Theophanies
“Manahil Bandukwala’s poems are curious, heartfelt, joy-filled expeditions: through rainstorms and supernovas, alternate realities and past lives, or sometimes simply through the park on a walk with a dear friend. Intergalactic yet deeply earthly, intertextual yet wonderfully original, Heliotropia is a place ‘where fear collides / with the little shield of love’ — and love prevails.”
— Mikko Harvey, author of Let the World Have You
“Like a daylily’s petals turn to the sun, so Manahil Bandukwala’s lyric angles against all odds to face the fervid beloved. Through archives of space and scripture, music and made magic, Heliotropia offers a threshold for the reader, a portal — to step over and through is to embark on a spiritual journey into love’s fathomless matrices. In intertextual poems as cosmic as they are botanic and tactile, Bandukwala invites readers to surrender to intimacy. ‘Love is worth loving,’ we are reminded, and against all odds, alternative endings, or origins, ‘the best is what we have.’ Here is a collection that grounds and glorifies, every invocation at once a flame, a sun, a psalm.”
— Sarah Ghazal Ali, author of Theophanies
Jury Citations
“Heliotropia is an intertextual and intergalactic poetry collection of joy and hope. Whether engaging with celestial bodies or botany, alternate worlds or tarot cards, the poems are infused with intimate, compelling honesty. The work welcomes readers as companions, confidantes, lovers, and friends. While playful, Heliotropia is also equally pointed in response to our Earth in crisis and socio-political unrest. Bandukwala offers us love poems and rallying cries—in balance, and all in search of life-giving light.”
— from the jurors of the Ottawa Book Award
“With form and language that surprises and delights, Manahil Bandukwala has crafted a perfect set of love poems for our current moment. Heliotropia is a study of love over seasons and across time, distance, and space, serving up love letters to lovers, friendship, and to the idea of love poetry itself. Aching in every syllable, Bandukwala’s work is a masterclass in restraint that somehow contains the entire galaxy in its shimmering petals. Heliotropia maps the curiosity and joy of human experience across creased bedsheets, good earth and the language of flowers. It invites readers across the threshold with arms spread wide in welcome; responding with an equally open heart is the only possible answer to this collection.”
— from the jurors of the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry
“Manahil Bandukwala’s Heliotropia undoes the estrangement of today’s chaotic everyday, quietly drawing the reader close, noticing, coaxing warmth and light from sharp angles and buried places. Moving gently, generously between the pulsing, visceral intimacies of personal and historic separation and splitting, wonderous, perplexing carnalities of an unfolding soul story, and galaxies that glory on beyond the digital chirp of our own atmospheric preoccupation, Bandukwala resolutely returns to the redemptive promise of joy, magic, love, ‘even after everything crumbled / and crumbled again.'”
— from the jurors of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award
“It’s an understatement to say it is difficult to write a good love poem and yet Bandukwala has given us a whole, shining book of them. Heliotropia is full-fledged, lyric blooming. This is poetry that is somehow both gentle and biting, reminding us of the continuous effort it takes to love amidst a multitude of griefs in the world. This exploration is a force, pulling the reader toward a future where, ‘something survived here, something that could be us.'”
— from the jurors of the Raymond Souster Award
“Heliotropia is an intertextual and intergalactic poetry collection of joy and hope. Whether engaging with celestial bodies or botany, alternate worlds or tarot cards, the poems are infused with intimate, compelling honesty. The work welcomes readers as companions, confidantes, lovers, and friends. While playful, Heliotropia is also equally pointed in response to our Earth in crisis and socio-political unrest. Bandukwala offers us love poems and rallying cries—in balance, and all in search of life-giving light.”
— from the jurors of the Ottawa Book Award
“With form and language that surprises and delights, Manahil Bandukwala has crafted a perfect set of love poems for our current moment. Heliotropia is a study of love over seasons and across time, distance, and space, serving up love letters to lovers, friendship, and to the idea of love poetry itself. Aching in every syllable, Bandukwala’s work is a masterclass in restraint that somehow contains the entire galaxy in its shimmering petals. Heliotropia maps the curiosity and joy of human experience across creased bedsheets, good earth and the language of flowers. It invites readers across the threshold with arms spread wide in welcome; responding with an equally open heart is the only possible answer to this collection.”
— from the jurors of the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry
“Manahil Bandukwala’s Heliotropia undoes the estrangement of today’s chaotic everyday, quietly drawing the reader close, noticing, coaxing warmth and light from sharp angles and buried places. Moving gently, generously between the pulsing, visceral intimacies of personal and historic separation and splitting, wonderous, perplexing carnalities of an unfolding soul story, and galaxies that glory on beyond the digital chirp of our own atmospheric preoccupation, Bandukwala resolutely returns to the redemptive promise of joy, magic, love, ‘even after everything crumbled / and crumbled again.'”
— from the jurors of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award
“It’s an understatement to say it is difficult to write a good love poem and yet Bandukwala has given us a whole, shining book of them. Heliotropia is full-fledged, lyric blooming. This is poetry that is somehow both gentle and biting, reminding us of the continuous effort it takes to love amidst a multitude of griefs in the world. This exploration is a force, pulling the reader toward a future where, ‘something survived here, something that could be us.'”
— from the jurors of the Raymond Souster Award
Reviews
Our Tomorrows Preserve a Love That Will Come, reviewed by Helena Ramsaroop in The Fiddlehead: Bandukwala has crafted a tender and hopeful poetry collection that seeks to find love in everyday moments, poems that are a testament to the practice of being alive and choosing love. By centring love and wonder within poems about nature and the universe itself, Bandukwala gives readers a collection that speaks to the heart. This book offers a moment to slow down and revel in the power of love. Gentle and defiant, Heliotropia is a radiant light in the dark.
Heliotropia, reviewed by Shazia Hafiz Ramji in Quill & Quire: With subtle but arresting insights, Bandukwala brings light to the quietest intimacies. Drawing inspiration from myriad poets and artists such as Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Canadian darling Phyllis Webb, Richard Siken’s poem “Scheherazade,” and the art of Egon Schiele, Bandukwala speaks of “a love that will come,” even as she references loss and melancholy, as when the speaker notes that their grandparents “are making their home / somewhere I won’t ever enter.”
Heliotropia, reviewed by Jami Macarty in New Pages: In a current poetic landscape that leans toward first-person narratives of traumatic pasts and uncertain futures, Bandukwala’s lyric poems risk expressing an opposite to loss and fear. They turn away from what is life-depleting and toward what is life-giving. In doing so Bandukwala offers a poetry that reaches for a beloved, for connection, for light, trusting that “love is always within reach.”
Manahil Bandukwala, Heliotropia, reviewed by Jay Miller in Bibliotages: Heliotropia is a formidable text, mise en page and celebration of all the elements that make her poetry enjoyable: the unexpected references to Star Trek, Miyazaki, that iconic line about being happy in life just doing taxes and laundry from Everything Everywhere All At Once, a sumptuous poem invoking the sultriness of Michael Ondaatje, and all the stylistic gestures and delightful experiments with shape, white space, line breaks, erasure, form and formatting, that have, between the span of just two books, become a calling card for Manahil Bandukwala's poems.
Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala, reviewed by rob mclennnan: [Bandukwala] writes open-hearted lyrics of love and distance, both temporal and physical, and a core to cling to amid chaos; writing how the heart can hold across time and geography, despite climate crisis and political chaos.
Our Tomorrows Preserve a Love That Will Come, reviewed by Helena Ramsaroop in The Fiddlehead: Bandukwala has crafted a tender and hopeful poetry collection that seeks to find love in everyday moments, poems that are a testament to the practice of being alive and choosing love. By centring love and wonder within poems about nature and the universe itself, Bandukwala gives readers a collection that speaks to the heart. This book offers a moment to slow down and revel in the power of love. Gentle and defiant, Heliotropia is a radiant light in the dark.
Heliotropia, reviewed by Shazia Hafiz Ramji in Quill & Quire: With subtle but arresting insights, Bandukwala brings light to the quietest intimacies. Drawing inspiration from myriad poets and artists such as Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Canadian darling Phyllis Webb, Richard Siken’s poem “Scheherazade,” and the art of Egon Schiele, Bandukwala speaks of “a love that will come,” even as she references loss and melancholy, as when the speaker notes that their grandparents “are making their home / somewhere I won’t ever enter.”
Heliotropia, reviewed by Jami Macarty in New Pages: In a current poetic landscape that leans toward first-person narratives of traumatic pasts and uncertain futures, Bandukwala’s lyric poems risk expressing an opposite to loss and fear. They turn away from what is life-depleting and toward what is life-giving. In doing so Bandukwala offers a poetry that reaches for a beloved, for connection, for light, trusting that “love is always within reach.”
Manahil Bandukwala, Heliotropia, reviewed by Jay Miller in Bibliotages: Heliotropia is a formidable text, mise en page and celebration of all the elements that make her poetry enjoyable: the unexpected references to Star Trek, Miyazaki, that iconic line about being happy in life just doing taxes and laundry from Everything Everywhere All At Once, a sumptuous poem invoking the sultriness of Michael Ondaatje, and all the stylistic gestures and delightful experiments with shape, white space, line breaks, erasure, form and formatting, that have, between the span of just two books, become a calling card for Manahil Bandukwala's poems.
Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala, reviewed by rob mclennnan: [Bandukwala] writes open-hearted lyrics of love and distance, both temporal and physical, and a core to cling to amid chaos; writing how the heart can hold across time and geography, despite climate crisis and political chaos.
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Press
Books by past CBC Literary Prizes winners and finalists that came out in 2024: Manahil Bandukwala's second collection of poems plays with form, structure and imagery to reflect on community, dialogue and personal growth.
Most Anticipated: Our 2024 Fall Poetry Preview, 49th Shelf
Books by past CBC Literary Prizes winners and finalists that came out in 2024: Manahil Bandukwala's second collection of poems plays with form, structure and imagery to reflect on community, dialogue and personal growth.
Most Anticipated: Our 2024 Fall Poetry Preview, 49th Shelf
