Kali, In Conversation reimagines Kali not as a distant deity, but as a living presence-fierce, intimate, and unafraid of ruin. In these powerful poems, Kali becomes both witness and weapon, a language through which the unspeakable finds form.
Drawing on decades of work alongside survivors of war, forced displacement, and conflict-related sexual violence, Mahi Ramakrishnan refuses to sanitize suffering. Kali's many arms, tongue, and eyes become extensions of fractured selves-bodies marked by memory, survival, and resistance.
She appears not only in temples, but in kitchens, hospital corridors, border crossings, and narrow alleys where silence has long been enforced.
These poems move through wreckage and return, carrying histories that institutions and states often attempt to erase. They insist that rage can be moral clarity, grief can be testimony, and survival is not submission.
This is not devotional poetry.
It does not offer comfort.
It does not resolve easily.
It bears witness.
