Book Launch: When I Reach for Your Pulse

Thursday, 28th September 2023 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM

At University Bookshop

Rushi Vyas, Otago University Press and the University Book Shop warmly invite you to the book launch of 'When I Reach for Your Pulse', the debut poetry collection by Rushi Vyas. To be launched by Liz Breslin and Eliana Gray.

All welcome!

Please RSVP to events@unibooks.co.nz for catering purposes

About the book:
In this electrifying debut, Rushi Vyas untangles slippery personal and political histories in the wake of a parent’s suicide. ‘When my father finally / died,’ he writes, ‘we […] burned, / like an effigy, the voiceless body.’ In this tough and tender, gently powerful collection, grief returns us to elemental silence, where ‘the wind is a muted vowel in the brush of pine / branches’.

These poems reach into this deep silence and bring back evidence of life as well as loss. This language listens as much as it sings, asking if it is possible to recover from the muting effects of British colonialism, American imperialism, patriarchy and caste hierarchies. Which cultural legacies do we release in order to heal? Which do we keep alive, and which keep us alive? A monument to yesterday and a path to tomorrow, When I Reach for Your Pulse reminds us of both the burden and the promise of inheritance. ‘[T]he wail outlasts / the dream,’ but time falls like water and so ‘the stream survives its source.’

Find out more at oup.nz/when-I-reach-for-your-pulse