The poems in Feeding the Ghosts will both break you open and heal you. Here, a journal entry begins, 'Dear One, I'm sorry that today is difficult for you. I'm sorry that you are suffering.' Mehta's poems grapple with many-layered burdens—grief, heartache, personal and professional disappointments—while offering the profound gift of showing us how to hold our struggles with a capacious sense of generosity, compassion, and gratitude. Amid pandemic restrictions and political tensions around race, class, and gender, Mehta's brown, queer, first-generation speaker invokes nature, memory, tradition, and family as a balm to self and reader alike. With heartbreaking clarity and precision, Mehta's poems illuminate the soul's deep sufferings while seeking solace in everyday joys: 'the snowdrops' heads bowed / in prayer.' The poems offer a way through shadow without turning away from darkness, glinting at times with playfulness as the speaker puns on 'antcestors' crawling on a dining table or daydreams of dancing in a drenched sari on a neighbor's tulips. Mehta's compelling narrative threads are woven with moments of prayer and lyricism, reflecting the 'refuge' offered by their 'small blue notebook, / and in waves crashing on shore.' The poems of Feeding the Ghost will leave you transformed as Mehta's intimate voice and gift for metaphor 'write and rewrite the world.'
~Dilruba Ahmed, author of Bring Now the Angels
A defining work that speaks to a Queer, immigrant experience that needs to be read.
~Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, author of I Don't Want to Be Understood
In their probing debut poetry collection, Rahul Mehta delves cycles of seasons, cycles of suffering, cycles of persistent aliveness. The poems in Feeding the Ghosts don't offer solutions to racism & homophobia, to trauma and grief: rather, they provide accompaniment, witness, wonder. Here we discover a profundity of the will to sever, to continue, to shape-shift into belonging as a daily practice toward uncovering and claiming beauty.
~Purvi Shah, author of Miracle Marks
Rahul Mehta has the gift of care, meaning in their hands the images and lines of the poem create a place in which the characters, situations, histories, and feelings therein are treated with tenderness and generosity. It is not an easy position to be vulnerable especially considering the difficulties of alienation and sorrow that lie within. In the end these poems are not only a record of a life lived, but like the best of poetry, they offer to a reader light and balm.
~Kazim Ali, author of Sukun: New and Selected Poems
I absolutely love this book, and it's not an exaggeration to say that reading it helped me to resist despair. Rahul Mehta's poems feel like beloved and necessary friends: funny, wise, and compassionate; sometimes angry, sometimes exhausted or in pain, sometimes joyful, sometimes full of emotions too complicated to untangle, and always fully, generously human."
~Kasey Jueds, author of The Thicket
[Mehta's] voice in these poems blends a sensitivity to language's music as well as a novelist's fluency with narrative. The combination of these gifts creates a series of gorgeous still lifes that also tell moving stories.... These soulful poems are full of flowers and trees, love and fear, moments of quiet resilience and aching heartbreak, and I left them feeling open-hearted and tender toward my own ghosts and those of others.
~Sejal Shah, Electric Literature
