Between Two British Summers

Visceral, darkly funny, yet suffused with raw tenderness, these poems delve deep into identity, sexuality, family and history. The heart of this collection lies in its ‘betweenness’, the quotidian woven into the elemental, the infinite into intimate, South Asian into British, resulting in a unique fabric of light and shadow self; language as a living breathing second skin. — Sophia Naz

Between Two British Summers traces memory, exile, desire, and shifting identity between bodies and borders. Inhabiting the ache of belonging across fractured homes and foreign landscapes, Malavika’s voice resists decorum, ushering in unflinching thought-provocation. A restless self in transit she is, in this book, between selves and two summers that never meet yet leave behind longing and quiet disquiet. — Rochelle Potkar As Charles Baudelaire puts it: ‘I shall give you, my dark one,/ Kisses frozen as the moon,/ Caresses such as snakes give/ Slithering round the open grave.’ Let me write to you in the first person as if it’s a letter to a poet, a young one, a beautiful soul. At the daybreak, on an early February dawn, I am reading, in fact, re-reading your manuscript. The Spring is just at the corner. And it hurts… ‘inch perfect’… ‘always on the edge’… Yes, you kept me always on the edge. Your words are powerful and spontaneous just as a mountain spring that can’t be contained. You play the inevitable trapeze of charged emotions brutally honest. — Kabita Mukhopadhyay