Petit Morts - by Mukund Gnanadesikan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Petit Morts: Meditations on Love and Death intertwines musings on the generative nature of love with a mourning of the finitude of the human body. It examines ways in which the dead dictate the emotional life of their survivors, and the manner in which life is reborn in a new form through interpersonal connection.. Spurred by musings on Freud's theories of Eros and Thanatos, psychiatrist Mukund Gnanadesikan takes the reader inside his own grief for loved ones and a dying universe, while offering hope of emotional regeneration in the form of basic human relatedness and empathy.

Review Quotes

Reading this chapbook of small tight lyric poems, I found myself asking is every death not a tear in who we once were? And is the poem a way to track the afterwards and the before? Mukund Gnanadesikan offers us tight lyrics on deaths large and small-a father passing, a child gone too soon, a "lepidoptera" who becomes metaphor, and much more. Mukund combines language from both the medical and natural world, and all of it weaved with forms of singing and exhortations to lead us to "the honeydew of succor". These are poems for anyone who has known grief and gone on, as these small poems go, as we all must. Read these pages slowly, sit with them. They are crumbs to lead you home.

-Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Dead are Everywhere Telling Us Things