Reading Palms: A Collection of Poems

by Oshanthaka Cabraal

Written over the course of a decade, 'Reading Palms' moves through shifting landscapes – both geographical and emotional. Rooted in Sri Lanka’s beauty and brutality, the collection also follows the poet’s path across continents, tracing the fault lines between memory and history, longing and belonging, the political and the personal. Some poems speak from lived experience; others arise from witnessing, imagining, or responding to the lives of others.

Together, they capture the quiet transformations of a life attentive to the world. Like the intimate act of reading a palm, the collection invites close attention, rewarding each return with new insight. Lyrical, experimental, and deeply observant, 'Reading Palms' asks what it means to map lives through language.

Kindle Edition

Published October 24, 2025

Reviews

[SIMON VICKERY]

Review without the Haiku with my love Overdue

Oshanthaka true to name ‘anthaka’ (end of suffering) listens in closely to the underbelly of the mood of his time he’s living through. Reminding us that the impersonal is never impartial, Oshanthaka hauntologically incarnates matriarchs past/present/future of his family and gets them talking again, prompting another turn of the wheel (dhamma) – live or learn from past-presently happening geo/people/political disasters?
To these means, Oshanthaka far from acquiescently revisits the robe and the sword of Buddhist – oftentimes made mis – apprehensions of non-violence, in what he’s seen and heard and lived over his short lifetime so far. Travelling ‘across oceans and four decades’. A bodhi (tree) is not always just a bodhi.
We find some relief in an ‘[…]unforgiving heart’, where Oshanthaka upends the tortured artist trope and makes himself naked, in some one we all know.

[Gayanga Dissanayaka · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poetry collection that simply yet profoundly speaks stories and experiences that truly matter and need to be heard. A must-read!