In XXL, Aditya Shankar explores the trails of contemporary relations, fractured across layers of being: metals, human, animals, and memory. He explores the love between waterfall and the electric bulb, cafe and the cycle, chair and orgasm, explorer and fruit boring worm, jeans and dying rivers. If the poems in this collection are imagined as a singular narrative, an eye at the urban balcony opening to wilderness is the midpoint. It cannot spot either the hooting owl or the factory sounding the siren, but together they construct the voice of a new urban god residing in a designer city beneath a designer sky. The voice we encounter in Aditya Shankar's XXL is direct, zany, and angry. The longing for anonymity renders it loud in the reader's mind: "I'm the seed of the fruit, the bug saves for the last.
