Birds Bones & Melanchola – Nanaviti was published in August 2023 and is a deeply internal, personal, and hauntingly beautiful poetry chapbook collection. 

Author Anushri Nanavati best summarizes the inspiration for the book: “Birds have hollow bones, continually flying and falling from highs to lows, and therein lies the inspiration behind both the title and the content.” This collection of over fifty free verse poems is over eighty pages and is separated into three distinct sections. 

The three distinct sections are titled To Whomsoever It May Concern, Months in Retrospect, and Soliloquies. While these sections themselves are different, they carry the same tone and expert craft throughout the collection. Nanavati writes with the practiced care of someone intimately aware of the importance of her subject matter. The poems are Melancholic, and you might expect from the title, but they are also celebratory. Nanavati connects to the raw humanity in all of us. Her background in psychoanalysis gives her the ability to write about the internal complexity of the human experience with a piercing resonance.

Here’s an excerpt from her poem “Hunter” as an example:

“there are knives in your ribcage.

you lie on your bed
like a deer that met
the wrong end of a shotgun.” (Nanavati, 12)

 

 

Intertextuality & Allusion

 

What really puts the ribbon on this already beautifully penned collection is the amount of perfectly placed allusion and intertextuality. There is allusion in the titles of the poems themselves, such as “Freudian” and “Naphthalene,” which add layers of meanings and contexts that prime the reader’s mind as they read. However, even the poems themselves are rich with these references. Take, for example, this excerpt from “Frozen,” 

“I feel my hair coated in hoarfrost,
sticking cold to my scalp
a Medusa wig
and my feet have lost toes
to a black-purple gulp
of frostbite” (Nanavati, 53)

 

or again in her poem “April,”

“You slept like Endymion in spring,
More alive in limbo
Than asters limbering
Underfoot” (Nanavati, 36)

 

These moments are frequent and well done throughout the entire collection. As a reader, they are the most pleasant surprise in a poem. They don’t detract from the meaning of the poem, and they add so much for those who want to engage with the deeper layers.

New Perspectives

In an interview with the Paris Review, Rita Dove once said, “Bad confessional poetry has always raised my hackles…Ooh, look at all this blood! But I’m like, No one’s interested in your blood. Make me bleed as I’m reading.” Now, I know Rita Dove was talking in the abstract, but Birds, Bones, & Melancholia exemplifies Dove’s own words. There is an amazing quality in Nanavati’s poetry to convey her perspectives on mental illness and melancholia. If you are someone who has experienced either, these poems will not only resonate with you, but will surprise you with their penetrating imagery.

But what impressed me about this collection was how, even if you haven’t suffered from mental illness, Nanavati’s poetry conveys everything you need to know. Take this example from her poem “Iron Will.”

“Anemia is more a state of mind
The dizziness can be desired
As ribs and spines become aesthetic
And each bone is admired
To wish for pallor is picking petals
In a garden within walls” (Nanavati, 52)

 

 

Movements in Art

My favorite poem in the collection is in the first section of the collection, To Whomsoever It May Concern. The poem is titled “Movements in Art,” and it is about exactly what it sounds like. Each stanza is separated into various movements in art. This poem perfectly exemplifies the allusion that colors many of her poems, while also giving new perspectives through the medium of artistic movements. 

“Expressionism:
You painted nightjars with sporadic
frissons of sanity, carouseling
brown and gray and black into a
morbid see-saw parody of
decaying fantasies.” (Nanavati, 6)

 

The way she frames each stanza with an artistic movement enriches each image. I pulled up a couple of images of expressionist paintings that add so much to the poem. “sporadic / frissons of sanity” captures expressionist art in a beautifully succinct way. “see-saw parody of / decaying fantasies” maintains that touchstone of melancholia that is threaded throughout this collection. It is a perfectly crafted and representative poem. 

Birds, Bones, & Melancholia takes you on a journey through the internal world of Anushri Nanavati. She writes poems that will rip your heart out, while simultaneously achieving a delicacy and intentionality that will keep you wanting more. Her imagery surprises and delights, and her perspective will change the way you see the world. At the end of the foreword in this book, Dr. Alan Karbelnig sums up Nanavati’s poems perfectly:

“Ready yourselves for the knives, the vulnerability, and the exposure. And, at the same time, prepare for a rare, truly transcendental experience.”

— C. W. Bryan, Book Review Editor

Founder and writer at poetryispretentious.com and the author of the chapbook Celine: An Elegy, published with Bottlecap Press.