About the Book: The Last Time I Saw You: Poems
Akhil Katyals The Last Time I Saw You tells the story of how we encounter grief.
It intimately lays out the poets experience of an event of loss and its
aftermath. Tracing the moments from when the abyss unexpectedly opens to the
gradual resurgence of the ordinary, these poems resonate with both raw and
deeply considered emotion.
What helps him move on is the deciduous forest of memories surrounding him, and
an unlikely cast of people (an eighteenth-century warrior-princess, Ustad
Bismillah Khan, a nineteenth-century naturalist, a mediaeval saint), animals
(millipedes, bats, blue bulls) and objects (quartzite, pigeon feathers,
envelopes).