Manahil Bandukwala
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  Manahil Bandukwala

​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.
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Advanced Praise
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“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.

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

MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022)

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MONUMENT is a conversation with Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal, which moves her legacy beyond the Taj Mahal

MONUMENT upturns notions of love, monumentalisation, and empire by exploring buried facets of Mumtaz Mahal’s story. The collection layers linear time and geographical space to chart the continuing presence of historical legacies. It considers what alternate futures could have been possible. Who are we when we continue to make the same mistakes? Beyond distance, time, and boundaries, what do we still carry?

Shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

2nd Place, 2023 Alcuin Award for Design
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Advanced Praise
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"Manahil Bandukwala's MONUMENT is a profound evocation of unbelonging. What is it, for example, to 'unbelong' as a mode of consciousness (observing one's life from 'a vantage point')? Bandukwala approaches this question through the senses, exploring vectors from 'the incorporeal part of you' to deeply felt iterations of desire: the 'question of intimacy.' In one astonishing poem, '1628,' the word 'Empire' is licked from a lover's back, leaving the taste of ash and something rotting in the mouth: 'On your back I kissed empire then / smudged it off, tasted dirt on tongue tip / worms crawled their way out of the holes / of my body.' Grief and need comprise a 'love language as architecture,' in this deeply felt and brilliant debut collection."
— Bhanu Kapil​

​"I will not call Manahil Bandukwala's MONUMENT beautiful, not because it is not so, but because starting and ending with this adjective would be an insult in the context of lines such as 'I saw his love start / and end with your beauty.' Gendering, conquest, structural violence, power, history — how one hand has managed to embrace the weight and wide sweep of these materials feels incomprehensible. Bandukwala's language is lushly lyrical and profoundly intimate, with a control that reveals mastery. Keenly thoughtful and wholly restorative, MONUMENT is 'an empire overgrown with hibiscus and sunflower,' reminding us that it is 'not too late to teach of love's abundance.' A sensitive, urgent, astonishing, masterful, and necessary debut."
— Doyali Islam
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"Bandukwala is a lyric truth-teller, exposing the secrets of a royal family corrupted by violence. Through intimate conversations with the spirit of Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal, we view a life cut short and fashioned into a false narrative. Now I want to return to Agra with MONUMENT in hand so I too might 'walk the labyrinth / and listen to your footsteps / echoing.'"
— Farzana Doctor

Reviews
Prayer and Declaration, reviewed by April Thompson in Geist: It takes a badass poet to collapse time the way Bandukwala does, and her poem “Restart, After Animal Crossing” is a testament to this. Here, she threads the futility of playing a Simulation Management video game during the pandemic with the building of the Taj Mahal, in a way that just makes sense. ​

MONUMENT: A 91-page Love Letter to Mumtaz Mahal, reviewed by Sophie Dufresne in The Link: In all, MONUMENT is a resounding expression of frustration with Arjumand Banu’s fate. Bandukwala offers insight into a rich historical period without sacrificing any of the work’s poetic qualities. 

Manahil Bandukwala, Monument, reviewed by rob mclennan: There are layers and shimmerings of history and geography that ripple across this collection, offering her subject a long shadow across a country and a culture she held herself up to, and into the most human of simple moments.

Between the Cracks of Empire: A Review of Manahil Bandukwala's MONUMENT, reviewed by Maryam Gowralli in Filling Station: Like something both free-flowing and crumbling, Bandukwala writes with a tone of sensitivity, yearning, and texture. Moreover, she does not shy away from the uncomfortable concerning bodily exploitation and empire-building, all the while wishing for better social realities.

Monument by Manahil Bandukwala, reviewed by Margaryta Golovchenko​ in The Temz Review: There is also a poetic and technical monumentality to Bandukwala’s collection that needs to be acknowledged, both because of how carefully it is researched but also how meticulously it is put together.

The Work of Immortalizing: A Review of Manahil Bandukwala’s Monument reviewed by Namitha Rathinapillai in Plenitude: To write a book of poetry that explores the history of a person poses a particular challenge: to write the factual as more than just facts but as symbolic, as imaginative, as lyrical, and of course, as page turning. Bandukwala effortlessly writes to, as, and for Mumtaz Mahal, balancing the multitude of various perspectives with ease.

Monument, by Manahil Bandukwala, reviewed by Jerome Melançon in Periodicities: The collection is sharp, precise, concise. It resists the temptation to elevate a monument to a life and instead makes itself a moment of its continuation.

Prose poems take root in the forest, reviewed by Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen in Winnipeg Free Press: The poems in Monument are deeply searching — for truth, for justice, even as Bandukwala is clear that some harms cannot be redressed.

​Bandukwala’s Monument, reviewed by Robert Hogg in The Typescript: Language, on the other hand, while mutable, grows in strength over time. And our story is a much more fluid testament to love lost to time, but regained and immortalized by the poem through the fluidity of language.

Interviews
Listen to and read interviews about MONUMENT online:
  • Converation with Ellen Chang-Richardson, Ottawa International Writers Festival Podcast
  • Monuments and the Speaker with Manahil Bandukwala, Page Fright: A Literary Podcast
  • Line and Lyric, Open Book
  • Mini-interview: Manahil Bandukwala, Pearl Pirie’s blog

Press
Taming the Book Publicity Beast: Books I'm Still Thinking About Two Years Later, Paul Vermeersch
Bandukwala’s poetry jumps through time and space offering a glimpse into both historical and alternate contexts for the Taj Mahal and the complex story behind it. At its centre is the Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal, the life she lived, and the lives she didn’t live. The text itself is reflective and ephemeral, capturing fleeting moments and making poetic monuments of them. A superb debut by a poet whose work is certainly worthy of your time… and your memory. 

Books of the Year, 2022, Quill & Quire
Taking inspiration from Irfan Ali, Danez Smith, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and the “folktales that linger,” Bandukwala’s debut is steeped in the history of South Asia, interrogating its beauty, violence, and grand narratives, turning toward braided stories and resonant feminism.
— Shazia Hafiz Ramji

Fall Favourites of 2022, Shrapnel Magazine
This collection about both monuments and moments is told through the lens of Mumtaz Mahal, the empress consort whose death led to the building of the Taj Mahal as her tomb. We’ve been loving Bandukwala’s poems for years, adoring her eye for detail in precise and perfect turns of phrase, her knack for enjambment that both comforts and startles, and, above all, her choice to centre love, love, love—even in poems with an edge of mourning or rage to them.

Beautiful Books: Monument, All Lit Up
Brainstorming key words were an integral part to forming our vision. We hoped that the design would feel sensual, quiet, defiant, ephemeral, mournful, and subversive. It was also helpful to look outward for inspiration.

What We're Reading: Staff Writer Picks, Fall 2022, Hamilton Review of Books

Most Anticipated: Our 2022 Fall Poetry Preview, 49th Shelf

Most Anticipated Poetry & Poet Essay Books 2022, Pearl Pirie’s blog

​3 Poems from MONUMENT, The Temz Review
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