Author Subhashini Kaligotla launches her new poetry collection My Life Closed Twice (Copper Coin, 2025), with Jeet Thayil.

In My Life Closed Twice, Subhashini Kaligotla charts the long aftermath of grief, and its recursive, obsessive cadences. Drawing on premodern India’s art, literature, and history, through invented forms and received ones, in fragments, litanies, lists, and queries, the poems in this spare volume embody the psychological terrain of the grieving. Two premature deaths are at the heart of the book. Kaligotla writes of their immediate aftereffects and their enduring impact. She braids her voice with voices from India’s past—from the unknown bards of the Sanskrit epics who counsel equanimity in the face of catastrophe to the laments of Ashoka, Bilhana, and Jahangir.
 

Author Bio

Subhashini Kaligotla is a poet and an art historian of ancient and medieval South Asia. She is author of the poetry collection Bird of the Indian Subcontinent and the monograph Shiva’s Waterfront Temples. She teaches at Columbia, dividing her time between New York City and Hyderabad.
 

Advance Praise for My Life Closed Twice

Subhashini Kaligotla’s ingeniously fashioned poetic structures—which are light, flexible, delicate yet possessed of remarkable tensile strength and architectural clarity and integrity—aren’t just beautiful in themselves. They’re also vessels for deep imaginative feeling and thinking and wondering and longing. She has a unique, compelling lyric voice and a distinguished twenty-first century consciousness.

- Vijay Seshadri

Anger, denial, bargaining, despair, all the stages of grief except acceptance, each stage overlaid with the forensic precision generated by love when it has nowhere to go. These enraged, laceratingly plainspoken poems burn with the singular self-awareness that is the writer's curse, and the writer's gift. Two deaths enclose the book like 'two dates // enclosed / by parentheses'. It is impossible to read, say, 'Only Your Brother Will You Lose' – its fifty shards hammered into the flesh like fifty nine-inch nails – and come away unscathed. 

- Jeet Thayil