Heaven is Only a Part of Our Body Where All the Sickness Resides

by Tanya Singh

This micro-chapbook is a part of the 2018 Ghost City Press Summer Micro-Chap Series.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

24 pages, ebook

First published June 6, 2018

About the author

Tanya "JADE VINE" Singh is a queer, transgender/non-binary poet, essayist & teaching artist from India. Their work has appeared in Gone Lawn, Minola Review, Polyphony H.S, and elsewhere.

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is part of Ghost City Press's summer microchapbook series, which i highly recommend. i found the poetry fascinating and strong.i liked how the poems were a response to Partition and its effects on the speaker's family. there's an interesting mix of fact and emotion, cerebral and visceral.

[Topaz Winters · Rating 3 out of 5]

"someone somewhere fell in love & still lived."

[Kelley Cantrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

"anything can be beautiful if you
Spill it with less blood" This line will stay with me for a long time.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love this chapbook. full of beautiful language, unexpected turns, moments that leave you breathless. this is a chapbook deeply connected to space and place, a chapbook of self and separations, and it spans years, beginning with the partition of british india in 1947. in each section we hear the speaker reflect in profound and personal language. each page demands careful attention, and i have read this collection several times now, finding new places to stop each time.

"to survive is a kind of beautiful,
when i grow up i want to be old
a beautiful breastful flower breathing."

and this beautiful chapbook of poems is available for free/pay-what-you-will through ghost city press:
https://ghostcitypress.com/2018-summe...

[Jeremy Mifsud · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkable poetry! I've enjoyed reading this chapbook. Hard to put words in a review. I'm going to leave you with two lines from the first poem:
"When a dog eats dog, do we mourn
the dog who died, or the dog who learnt to kill?"

[jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

When a dog eats dog, do we mourn
the dog who died, or the dog who learnt to kill?

How softness enables we to endure crushing forces, how bodies are crushed, how beautiful a childhood
could’ve been.

Everything was once a love poem.

Someone somewhere fell in love & still lived

There are always bodies that don’t rise to meet any maker

I want to kiss the skin, but not the softness of the wounds

I can love anything as long as it’s mine. Anything that wasn’t could be hated just as easily, that was the power bestowed upon me. Lately I have come to fear myself.

[Thomas Croom 3rd · Rating 5 out of 5]

It sounds a easy thing that I o o