Arundhathi Subramaniams poems map a wobbling world, trying to find its axis in a season of change. Fabrics tear, lands splinter, stances harden, loved ones die, names dissolve. But wandering through these pages are some extraordinary women women who vault nimbly over borders, walk naked, walk aslant, and sometimes upside down. Leaping from the past into a global present, these exuberant voices offer tips on how to retain ones spine through lifes giddiest rollercoaster rides. Blurring the divide between the mundane and the magical, the historical and the imaginary, they point to a new world that might lie within the folds of the old. A world that requires a new set of skills: how to find the right nicknames, how to gatecrash into the present, how to go skinny-dipping in the self. These are songs of bewilderment, insight and startling freedom. Arundhathi Subramaniam has published five collections in India and three books with Bloodaxe in the UK including When God Is a Traveller (2014), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Love Without a Story (2020). Her earlier work is available in Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009). She has published other books on Buddhism and spiritual figures.
Arvustused
By turns laconic and passionate, she asks questions about morality and integrity that many poets simply refuse to take on. Yet she is also an extraordinary love poet A remarkable book from a remarkable poet. -- John Burnside * on Where I Live * A sense of wonder and striking contrasts pervade the Indian poets fourth collection. The sacred meets the everyday, cerebral wordplay delivers full-blooded emotion, and ancient Hindu myths run alongside contemporary urban life. Breathtaking in scope, taking in religious faith, friendships, love affairs and existential themes. Often the work questions poetry itself but it is always rooted in the physical and the tangible, with fresh visual imagery that really packs a punch. Bold and thought-provoking. -- Juanita Coulson * The Lady * These beautiful poems have that quality of being breathed into the world that always means that deep experience went into them. The spirituality here is so light, so witty, so spontaneous, so open to the unknown, so open to the life of the mind, so generous, so visceral, how did it come to be soheavy a topic in the West? How did it come to be a topic at all? -- Dennis Nurkse Subramaniams verse is imbued with the spiritual and mythic in this wonderful collection, Love Without a Story. Poised and measured, these poems encourage the reader to think and feel deeply, to sit and watch as Subramaniam unveils artfully composed observations about the cosmos we inhabit and those we share it with. Love Without a Story is a breath-taking and heart-warming collection. * Poetry Book Society Bulletin *
9 Authors note
Cycling Hands Free on Air
15 The World Takes a Breath
17 Staying Unnamed
19 The Marketplace of Poets
21 The Breaking News Lullaby
24 Masks Off
26 The Great Mother
28 Grant a Woman Her Fifties
30 This Fruit
32 The Hand
34 The World Breaks
36 And Suddenly Its Evening
38 The Tailor
40 The Women No Longer Wait
43 Another Way to Stop Waiting
45 What Stories are Left
47 Patachara Awakens
The Gallery of Upside Down Women
53 That Girl from Karaikkal
56 The Truth-speakers Word Doesnt Change
59 Where the Yoginis Wear No Heads
62 Questions for Akka Mahadevi
64 Unstained by White
68 The Maker of Indigo Poems
Gods Forgotten Nickname
75 The Idol Worshippers Song
76 The Idolaters Way
78 Gods Forgotten Nickname
81 Nothing Is Singular
83 What Do You Do with the Moon in Urdu Poetry?
86 Just in Case
87 Forgiving Teachers
89 Some Names Take Time
92 The Dog in the Manhattan Elevator
94 Some Said He Looked Like James Dean
96 When Two Women Drink Chai Together
98 Consecration
100 Tips for Growing Up
104 The Crone
106 Creation Story
111 Acknowledgements
Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning poet and writer on spirituality and culture. She has published four books of poetry in the UK with Bloodaxe: Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009), which combines selections from her first two Indian collections, On Cleaning Book-shelves and Where I Live, with new work; When God Is a Traveller (2014), a Poetry Book Society Choice, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry (awarded by Indias national academy of letters), the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize at the Jaipur Literary Festival, and the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy; Love Without a Story (2020); and The Gallery of Upside Down Women (2025).
Her recent work includes Women Who Wear Only Themselves: Four Travelers on Their Sacred Journeys (Harper Collins, US, 2025) and Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry (Penguin Books India, 2024). Previous books include The Book of Buddha (Penguin, 2005), and the biography, Sadhguru: More Than a Life (Penguin, 2010), as well as Eating God: A Book of Bhakti Poetry (Penguin, 2014).
In 2006 she appeared at Londons Poetry International festival and gave readings throughout Britain on a tour organised by the Poetry Society. She also took part in the T.S. Eliot Prize reading at Londons Southbank Centre in 2015.
She mostly lives in Mumbai, Chennai and New York.
