Immediately addressing the reader, the book begins with “you write back to your birth,” each verse’s refrain gathering weight and dimension. Who is Biswas addressing here? The reader? Their child? Their younger self? Spinning out from memories of a childhood in Benin and Delhi, the next poem ‘live forward’ strikes an immediate counterpoint. Written without a verse break, the second-person insistence continues, only this time the writing drips hot with prophecy and intuition, abandoning any sense of nostalgia or remembering. “Talk yourself into being as the mad do,” suggests a voice seemingly from somewhere deep behind Biswas.

Demanding space for an identity exploited, overlooked and racialised, poems like these evoke slam poetry at its best, its urgent storytelling often as pragmatic as it is artistic. As a teenager growing up in Sydney, poetry lineups often featured Western Sydney’s best, like queer Palestinian-Australian poet Candy Royalle (RIP), or multi-talented Malaysian-Australian Omar Musa. These were ethicists lecturing on refugee politics, Islamophobia, or simply what it meant to be vulnerable and in love. Biswas’ own hookup serenade to the west goes, “you’ll still be alight with how we’ve been touching you, making you our own.” Parramatta, I recently discovered, has long been a haunt for bunyips and other spectral forces, scaring whities back toward the colony’s grip.¹ In lieu of any other shared tradition, the suburb – a muddle of migrant identities pushed to Sydney’s brim – becomes an identifier for a space of transformation.²

“It is psychotic not to know where you are in a national space,” observes fellow South Asian diaspora poet Bhanu Kapil. Here she draws on the shifting boundaries of the nation during the often overlooked violent Partition of India and Pakistan – the same rupture in my own paternal line. In Biswas’ Partition poem ‘inheritance’, memory and ancestry is a “knife-shaped heirloom”, capable of both preventing and inflicting suffering. This dance between being predator and prey is central to Biswas’ past two collections, unsettling any clean sense of the Indian migrant as simply a victim. Yes, there are poems that batter you with recollections of hate speech and wounds passed down over generations – but just as quickly, Biswas bursts into a bloodthirst, contradicting a vegetarian pacifism usually associated with Hindus:

kicked in. bliss


I am reminded of what is excluded from Hinduism, as is expressed by Dalit poets such as ND Rajkumar, whose god speaks through possession, eating pig flesh, drinking and smoking in ‘the no-man’s land’.³ Likewise, Biswas is “under Queen Victoria Building with a hard-on for death,” in the underground of Sydney, no doubt on their way to catching a train out to a distant west.

As we crash down from (dis)place(ment) and the maddening mind, the book’s final third, ‘bodies’, emphasises “all the things that passed into silence,” into the flesh and “trapped beneath tongues”. Brownness is a coffin in which humanity is buried. Fittingly then, Frida Kahlo is exhumed here, out from the mass-produced clichés of her identity. I recently saw a reel showing Frida’s portrait, printed and then consumed via luxury cake, in an overpriced novelty gastronomy restaurant. In the pungent potpourri of her florid girlhood remains the lesser known identities of queerness, disability and indigeneity.

the eyes of night

It is up to poets to restore the wings of Kahlo, and see to it that her soaring possibility is not captured by capital. In the poem ‘myths’, a cast of old Greek and Gita gods mingle together, each contributing their lines to build the body of the poet. There is a pluriverse of selves inside the poet, and inversely a singularity in which all these figures (us figures?) are contained. The haikus included in this section quietly reinforce a body that must contort into forms foreign and foreboding. In the end, the book puddles into ‘mohini’, the only female incarnation of the typically male Vishnu — finally, some sense of tradition that encapsulates Biswas’ multiplicity. A man and a woman, a god and a goddess, a lie and a truth… 

After the restless shifting through stories personal and mythical, through times past and prophetic, the step into Mohini seems to venerate a graceful poisonous wo/man, poised at the brink of contradiction.

The garland maker pierces the flower with a needle in order to bring through a string, before the garland is thrown upon the idol to offer to the gods its withering. The Maker of Garlands is a book worthy of the mystical paradox its title describes. Its language is immediate, raw and accessible, with hints of the sort of fantastically ferocious description you might expect from a vampiric thriller. Yet there is something deeper, beguiling and elusive, tracing the sacred with personal allegories, madly dashingly between the mythical and contemporary. I am reminded once again that to be Indian, Hindu, of the diaspora – and to be displaced, or so-called “Australian” – is a process continually remade. When you go out looking for yourself, I hope you find something as rich as Biswas’ poetry.