Every review is special, but when it has been crafted by an accomplished author and poet – Gayathri Prabhu – it leaves one speechless.
“You can kill a book quicker by your silence than by a bad review.”
― EA Bucchianeri
Here it is:
“Ophthalmologist, Storyteller, Poet are the three words and identities that accompany Upreet Dhaliwal’s name on her website and on the cover of her recently published book of poetry, InVerse Medicine: Poems About Things Often Left Unsaid (2021). Comprising of 27 poems, this collection evokes a tantalising possibility of what the specific location of identities, between or through medicine and literature, can illuminate for us. It equally reminds us that readers are located as well, in time, space and identity. We are reading this book during a global health catastrophe that has no precedent in our lifetimes for its spread and devastation. Our reading can thus attune us to how poetry listens, speaks and heals with empathy, and Dhaliwal crafts each poem with this explicit tenor.
The Preface draws attention to the first poem of the collection and that its first-person voice is autobiographical. This poem titled “Four-leaf Clover” is addressed to a dead daughter, a newborn who is taken for surgery even as the mother is still groggy.”
Read the full review online at Reading Room Co