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. |
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
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.
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.
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
