Yellow Flower Gills Me Whole

“Some poems make you stop in your tracks, but Ghosh’s spiritually charged epigrammatic poems will set you spinning through your own being. Yellow Flower Gills Me Whole holds up a shocking compact mirror to the mind, which reflects the universal crisis of aliveness, while turning you inside out with the quickness of a Celan lyric or a Dickinson dash. Read these poems in a dim room and they will light it up like a ‘haul of stars.’ No, they will light you up—prepare to haunt the life you know.”

“Sid Ghosh’s Yellow Flower Gills Me Whole meanders metaphysics and language into the philosophical depths of neuroqueer galaxies. These aphoristic poems invite us to spin toward a politics and poetics of freedom-making by way of ‘kindred fractals,’ a ‘giving of hearts,’ and ‘infinite / maiden / wormholes.’ In a world where ‘man has made / kindred police,’ Ghosh’s writing divines other possibilities through a sparkling kinship of madnesses. With them, I am gilled.”

“In Yellow Flower Gills Me Whole, poems function as tremulous amulets crushed before our eyes and relieved of their essence. Our language is offered the eerie ability to laugh at itself and always within a series of well-appointed trap doors. A charming syllabic intelligence is repeatedly on display here, ‘To think mind is hot / is to hammer bones with air.’ Rarely does a collection so clearly reveal the musicality of a poet’s thinking, the quick elision and adornment, all the bonfires that spring up through instinct. Ghosh is a great stylist, meaning his deft tone of voice seems to morph at will. He is kindly cutting brush from our crowded trail and dousing it with selective light.”