By Rushi Vyas (Otago University Press, 2023)
When I Reach for Your Pulse is an uncomfortable read, but this is not about our discomfort. This is about Rushi’s sustained generosity in sharing his grief, his anger, his complex responses to living with the life and death of “the man who earned the money mom used to raise me” (‘Love story with Rolex’) – his father.
Rushi writes as a child, and the generous and articulate adult that child became. He examines “the unflinching / thin exoskeleton between rage / and vulnerability” (‘Entomology // Mirage’) through car drives, sports games, wider colonising histories, letters for/after his father. It’s a delicate dance to write about trauma, and Rushi holds his readers gently through the stories of family violence and suicide.
It’s no wonder this manuscript was twice a finalist for national poetry awards in the United States, and has also been published over there this year. This, from ‘Scaffold’: “Do not make beautiful the noose or its pedestal, the scaffold is almost a catastrophe.”
Liz Breslin
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