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Mother Tongue Apologize
Humor—dark, sharp, and often redemptive—permeates this irresistible collection of poems exploring womanhood, family and sexual relationships with the candor of a camera's eye 'blinking to capture one perfect shot.' Preeti Vangani cuts to the heart of each moment like a reporter on the beat; hers is a poetry of the unresolved present and the mercurial future tense. What an extraordinary mind is at work in these pages.D A POWELL
- GenresPoetry
74 pages, Paperback
Published February 4, 2019
53 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 12, 2019
More than ode to her mother, this collection is an ode to life. And what is life but losing everything we love one step at a time. There is immense pain in this collection of poems and with it terrific word play that ignites ones body and ones soul. A must read for everyone who is looking for good poetry. Vangani has a way of writing about her experiences which touches some deep part of you and wants you to do more with life. Highly recommend!
March 13, 2019
It's hard to pick one favorite thing about 'Mother Tongue.' The collection explores subjects that are sometimes tough to talk about (loss, body image, family, sex, cancer, masturbation, relationships, and more) in a way that's more vivid than graphic and more control than chaos. However, there's something about how Vangani ends her poems that I don't get anywhere else. Each ending hits the reader like a question mark made out of bricks. Let this singing, rebellious collection be the start of much more to come.
May 20, 2019
This is a collection that I’ve had the pleasure of reading many times, and somehow every time it shocks and surprises me as if it’s totally new. It’s packed freshness, honesty, and emotion. Devastating, celebratory, and everything in between.
May 26, 2020
What is identity, what is life, after someone close to us are gone too soon? This book of poetry is intimate, personal, often humorous and very powerful. Vangani balances these elements perfectly line by line in each poem. These poems are touching and tender and honest. They are about youth and death and the complexities and brutalities of life and man. I Highly recommended this wonderful book of poetry.
September 8, 2020
This book is a collection of deeply personal odes and reflections. They explore a range of intimate topics in a naturally uninhibited manner. They are shared in beautiful detail with such clarity that I felt a connection even deeper and stronger than empathy - something that cuts directly to the very core of what it means to be human. Her words, like the memories shared in the book, shall not be unremembered.
April 15, 2019
It's a book you can't keep down. It's a book you want to preserve, go back to time and again, and share with the people you love. It's a book I want to gift my daughter. It's not a book but creation of a beautiful mind who has woven her raw emotions into a piece of art.
It's a book you should definitely read!
It's a book you should definitely read!
September 22, 2020
I have shifted to a cooler floor as I am thinking about poems from Preeti Vangani’s, Mother Tongue Apologise. From sweltering heat to the cold of autumn, bodies marvel at a leaf lifting away from trees much before we see sidewalks covered with brown, crunching, old veins under our foot. Our bodies tend to figure out something that is going to arrive much before we actually see the change. That is my take away from the book.
In writing these poems, Vangani marks an overwhelming and dominant context--treatment of women, and moves it into another one. Her work can, in fact, be seen as an attempt to write several concentric presences of the female experience from a distinctively personal perspective. The subject of Mother Tongue Apologise is made by little nameless acts of violence, memory and love
With vivid descriptions, well thought out images, and a form which makes it collective as well as personal, at a time when violence is a new statistic every day, these poems even makes the puddles of Bombay revise with its own memory of mothers. They ask relevant questions – How is our identity rooted in loss, what does pop culture look like in our poems, ‘what about love’, how is life going to be? They ask these questions not just about loss of a loved one, but also while losing them every single day.
There is so much still that I have not covered in this review like the theme of feminist struggle or “Visiting Hours” being title of four poems or for that matter prose poems. This is because while reading these poems, I was reading another book called The Years by Annie Ernaux, a memoir that converses with time of 1940–1906 in France. She rescued time from time by capturing it in her memoir.
In this sense, Vangani through her poems in Mother Tongue Apologise has rescued a grief from historical anonymity. They are also trying to rescue someone from assimilation of grief and separation of grief. These are difficult things, and poetry in all its difficult terrains allows such experience to be laid bare. It pivots around the central contradiction in our lives: living with impossible memories
In writing these poems, Vangani marks an overwhelming and dominant context--treatment of women, and moves it into another one. Her work can, in fact, be seen as an attempt to write several concentric presences of the female experience from a distinctively personal perspective. The subject of Mother Tongue Apologise is made by little nameless acts of violence, memory and love
With vivid descriptions, well thought out images, and a form which makes it collective as well as personal, at a time when violence is a new statistic every day, these poems even makes the puddles of Bombay revise with its own memory of mothers. They ask relevant questions – How is our identity rooted in loss, what does pop culture look like in our poems, ‘what about love’, how is life going to be? They ask these questions not just about loss of a loved one, but also while losing them every single day.
There is so much still that I have not covered in this review like the theme of feminist struggle or “Visiting Hours” being title of four poems or for that matter prose poems. This is because while reading these poems, I was reading another book called The Years by Annie Ernaux, a memoir that converses with time of 1940–1906 in France. She rescued time from time by capturing it in her memoir.
In this sense, Vangani through her poems in Mother Tongue Apologise has rescued a grief from historical anonymity. They are also trying to rescue someone from assimilation of grief and separation of grief. These are difficult things, and poetry in all its difficult terrains allows such experience to be laid bare. It pivots around the central contradiction in our lives: living with impossible memories
August 9, 2023
"This is not mother would have wanted / to be this self-aware / to be this foolish"
Examining who we become as we battle to remain and free ourselves from the shadows of our mothers, our grandmothers, and all the women who come before us, poet Preeti Vangani explores desire, shame, hunger, loss in this devastating collection. At its core is a poetic voice learning to grieve by writing a poem. She writes, "this poem: part ruin part construction site, rumble on the other / side; I, my mouth open, encrypting the absent voice into a voice," and we know she means mother, she means sister, she means woman unspeaking, and we hope she collects our voices too, creating a spectacular beast of volume and wanting.
Poetry here is both salve and diagnoses ("but I am not sure my banging voice / reaches them at all); it is record and indictment; it is song and scripture: it is so many things at once, but never unfailing in the capable hands of an incredible poet.
Examining who we become as we battle to remain and free ourselves from the shadows of our mothers, our grandmothers, and all the women who come before us, poet Preeti Vangani explores desire, shame, hunger, loss in this devastating collection. At its core is a poetic voice learning to grieve by writing a poem. She writes, "this poem: part ruin part construction site, rumble on the other / side; I, my mouth open, encrypting the absent voice into a voice," and we know she means mother, she means sister, she means woman unspeaking, and we hope she collects our voices too, creating a spectacular beast of volume and wanting.
Poetry here is both salve and diagnoses ("but I am not sure my banging voice / reaches them at all); it is record and indictment; it is song and scripture: it is so many things at once, but never unfailing in the capable hands of an incredible poet.
March 10, 2024
Mother Tongue Apologize - Preeti Vangani
In a nutshell - A stun gun disguised as a book of poems. This book is an elegy born out of the poet’s urgent need to come to terms with the loss of her mother. The reality that this need exists in a world filled with patriarchy, a world where women are constrained to absurd moulds, where body-image is inherited from unrealistic magazines and where aspirations are constantly trampled upon brings to light how arduous this challenge of moving forward may be. When one is dealing with grief and loss, how do you prioritise which issue to overcome on any given day. The words on these pages are a constant yearning to break the cycle and exist as your true self. Preeti has poured her soul out on these pages and then some.
“Being a Woman
is to pay rent
To live
In your own body”
I highly recommend getting yourself a copy of this rare gem and assure you it's spine will stand proud among your favourite poets.
In a nutshell - A stun gun disguised as a book of poems. This book is an elegy born out of the poet’s urgent need to come to terms with the loss of her mother. The reality that this need exists in a world filled with patriarchy, a world where women are constrained to absurd moulds, where body-image is inherited from unrealistic magazines and where aspirations are constantly trampled upon brings to light how arduous this challenge of moving forward may be. When one is dealing with grief and loss, how do you prioritise which issue to overcome on any given day. The words on these pages are a constant yearning to break the cycle and exist as your true self. Preeti has poured her soul out on these pages and then some.
“Being a Woman
is to pay rent
To live
In your own body”
I highly recommend getting yourself a copy of this rare gem and assure you it's spine will stand proud among your favourite poets.
December 24, 2020
A poetic exploration of the intersection between grief and sexuality. I particularly enjoyed the variety of approaches with which the author explored the loss of her mother in verse. There's a large poetic range here that comes to mean ever so much for the reader as she sees the poet herself struggling in search for meaning.
March 26, 2019
Great book, would highly recommend if you want to see the world through the writers lens. The harsh reality portrayed is thought provoking and heart wrenching at the same time. The title itself is very impactful. Kudos to more female writers to speak the truth.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews