Bringing together the many voices, textures, and tonalities of an evolving urban and interior geography, The Map Is Not the Territory defies easy categorization. The poems in this debut collection surge through multiple cities, histories, languages, and cultural imaginaries. They explore the simultaneity of experience, the collisions of myth and city life, and the resonances between the sensory and the political.

Written over 15 years, these poems don’t presume to provide any easy answers. At times, viscerally present, they embody what it means for an artist to ask questions of lived experience and a rapidly transforming social and cultural world. In these pages, you might find yourself exhaling softly as you are caught in a moment of tenderness stolen from the city’s chaos, amidst the detritus of desire and the turmoil of development. Alternatively, you might embrace the comradeship of defiance in the quiet resolve of a Gond honey-hunter in the dense, labyrinthine forests of Chhattisgarh. Drawing their fire from the worlds of literature and performance, dhrupad music and visual art, cinema and theatre, many of these poems find resonance and rhythm as they drift seamlessly across mediums and forms of art-making.

In this collection, objects speak; birds, animals, forests, and rivers are accomplices; and traces of everyday urban happenstance become archival fragments in the surreal, ironic tableaus of movement and sensation that make up ordinary life. These poems, which do not presume to provide any easy answers, will both confound and enlighten you, opening up a “working space” of creative engagement with the world—but with the fond intimacy of a loving friend.

This book suggests that poetry can serve as a communique, a love letter, or a softly whispered entreaty—a way of reaching out and embracing the presence of another. It makes the reader feel and sense the words (as living beings, not inert objects), turning the quiet scribblings on a page into an activity of communion and sacred epiphany.

Listen to these words, dear reader, with care: these songs of freedom and belonging, hewn with artisanal affection and the spontaneous curiosity of love.