My City is a Murder of Crows: poems

Here is a book where a love of language doesn’t turn into mere technique, where craft doesn’t degenerate into mere cleverness, where self-awareness doesn’t slide into mere self-consciousness. Nikita Parik’s poems map cities and bodies, journeying past exoskeleton to hushed interior, leaving a welter of poignant images in their wake—an itr-seller ‘with old eyes’, a mouth that is ‘an Indian balcony during the months of saawan and bhaado’, a city that becomes ‘a stinking hilsa’ in a passenger’s tote bag. Warmly intelligent and tenderly alive, this is a book that holds many ‘promises’—and not just in the ‘future tense’. — Arundhathi Subramaniam Nikita Parik holds a Master's in Linguistics, a three-year diploma in French, and another Master’s in English. Diacritics of Desire (2019) is her debut book of poems, followed by Amour and Apocalypse (2020), a novel in translation. Published in India and overseas, she is the recipient of the Mukti Bose Memorial IPPL Young Poet Award 2022 and one of the Nissim Excellence in Writing Award 2020. Nikita currently edits the EKL Review.