Usha Akella writes with ‘Sanskrit mantras in her veins,’ from an exceedingly broad perspective – as feminist, activist, organizer, poet-citizen, engaging an intellect profoundly contemporary with the times. She spans a long reach, from the looming questions and fears around our intense and out of control pandemic to India’s National trauma in the Delhi rape case. ‘Each of us is a naïve question as we always have been/curved like an embryo.’ She probes, she thinks with each situation, she grapples with the world in all its manifestations, also as a mother, poised in anticipation of what may come, but always with a steady heart and hand and ear in poetry. One line sent chills up my spine, as she contemplates all kinds of extinctions. An image of Virginia Woolf ‘inching into the Ouse.’ We are truly at precipice and this poetry can help wake up the world to itself. Kudos.” —Anne Waldman, author of Trickster Feminism and Extinction Aria
Usha Akella
