Setting Traps for Light

Giti Chandra

‘To read through this capacious collection is to be embraced and illumined by intelligence and insight' – Paul Kane

In gathering poems attentive to what persists at the edge of loss, Giti Chandra finds herself in landscapes altered beyond recognition and in cities learning new vocabularies of grief. Her verses move between geographies – deserts, rivers and parks poised on fault lines – and often return to sites of erasure and transformation.

Political violence, climate collapse and the pandemic register as pressures shaping the air of her collection. Courage herein holds the ground as a sustaining force, underscoring the defiance to remain present – to look directly at loss, to inhabit uncertainty without retreat and to admit the pleasure that persists within sorrow. It survives as an ethical stance.

Measured and clear-eyed, Setting Traps for Light offers a poetics of looking closely at what breaks, what endures and what unexpectedly holds.