I HAD TO BREAK ME

Nisha’s personal poetry collection offers a searching reflection on losing love, losing one’s home, and losing oneself.

The works in this book are initially full of distress. The collection is divided into six sections, and references to molestation and loss of faith give its early poems an anguished tone. The speaker calls herself a healer in a broken health care system and also notes her privilege: “I don’t know why I complain when every luxury is presented / to me on a plate.” She also depicts her emotional pain through a lens of ongoing meditation and rumination, including cycles of insight followed by relapses into feelings of hopelessness. At times, an abundance of abstractions (“sins,” “toxicity”) make it a struggle to identify a distinct personality behind the voice. The collection becomes more compelling when it addresses the speaker’s experience after an earthquake in the author’s home country, Nepal, in 2015. This section’s poems are more image-driven; readers see the author step away from personal disheartenment and toward empathy with a devastated community. Readers will notice the shift as the speaker looks outward: “This building may shatter / This gate may collapse / This city may become rubble / I watch myself in complete surrender to this moment / No quake can make me fear the expansion within me.” When the sorrow is relentless, particularly in the early parts of the book, readers may be tempted not to linger. When they read about the speaker’s family after the earthquake, about the encampment and the danger, then the speaker’s voice feels embodied and invested, and the poems become more engaging as a result. The latter part of the book may offer hope to others who’ve lived through similar devastation; the arc from despair to acceptance is hard-earned.

Meditative works from an author who finds her strongest imagery in accounts of a disaster’s aftermath.