Her mouth a palace of lamps

Advance Praise:

"Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps utterly shimmers with wonder and grief. Yamini Pathak's debut gathers up spices, birds, rivers, and the ache of inheritance into beautiful poems that sing like morning ragas through the kitchens and corridors of home. This book is thick with tenderness and the wild, holy mess of being a witness, a daughter, and a most fierce keeper of stories."

— Aimee Nezhukumatathil, New York Times bestselling author of Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees.

"We might simply begin by meditating on the title of Yamini Pathak’s beautiful debut, Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps: its suggestion of the oral, and so the lyric, as a place of regal, eternal illumination. It is a mystic’s image, edging near the sacred sensuality pulsing even now through her primary poetic forbears: Rumi, Tagore, Sappho. Hers is a humble, earthly mysticism, and the poems—so unexpectedly—listen as truly as they sing. It is as if each poem eavesdrops on itself, hearing underneath its own words another language, the ancestral tongue almost lost, in which every name is the true name, less a word than a melody, a music, a raga, a ragini—a language from which one is exiled, “a language where yesterday also means tomorrow,” which is poetry’s own diaspora, where to be afar is also to be at home. It’s home of most intimate location, deeply internal, a drone in the marrow: “an ancient sound that my bones already know from someplace I couldn’t remember.”  What a gift it is to have this book of poems to help us remember, a book so good, it buzzes in the bones.

— Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Variations on Dawn and Dusk, long-listed for the National Book Award. 

"Simmering with rich details, Yamini Pathak’s lyrical collection, “Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps,” traverses the landscape of memory, myth, and family history. With tender insight and vivid imagery, these poems lure us into a world of mothers and daughters, widows and exiles, of street bazaars and quiet temples. Pathak skillfully translates the connection between beauty and loss, offering up elegies for a homeland, a childhood, a father. The poems in this intimate, debut collection remind us of the power of storytelling, of how words can sing us into a world that “doesn’t sing your name back to you.”

— Vandana Khanna, author of Burning Like Her Own Planet, finalist, 2024 Housatonic Book Award for Poetry

"In Yamini Pathak’s Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps we are “drawn more by scent than sight” into a landscape where our senses are deliciously overwhelmed by “street-food wafting up from the vendor’s cart,” and “boiling daal with buttered rice;” by the trickle of beans “pebbled river-smooth a susurration/ like the rustle of wind through palms.” The speaker’s memories of her native India invite the reader to feel what it means to be home, but also to consider what is lost with migration. What does it mean to mother oneself and others in a land not your own; to be true to yourself, to "chart my way/unharmed"?

— Leonora Simonovis, author of Study of the Raft, winner 2021 Colorado Prize for Poetry

Atlas of lost places

Praise for Atlas of Lost Places:

"Borderless and boundless, Atlas of Lost Places, is where half-ripe mangoes hang below the maimed sparrow's song, cutting through the sticky heat. It is where wings beat, and beasts emerge full of hiss and sass. It is where sour-lime pickles can serve as a cure for upset stomachs. It is a place where tigers scratch at your front door.

Yamini Pathak is a natural storyteller, and her music and longing emerge tenderly and powerfully in this fine debut chapbook taking her reader on a mystical journey where landscapes shift in seconds, and reveal, within these pages, the quickness with which a woman's body can morph from husband-eater into goddess."

— Ysabel Gonzalez, author of Wild Invocations

"In Atlas of Lost Places, Yamini Pathak, with her dreamy imagery and precise diction, transports us into lost and forgotten lands. I was struck deeply by her vision of the 'familiar territory' of a child's body evolving in a 'planet deep inside me', while also recognizing the unknown of what her children 'born far from home' will never know. There is so much love in this book, I found myself swirling in its variegated shades - the compassion, the fight, the morphed ecstasy, its hidden remnants. 

Complementing this love is the part we run away from - cruelty, shame, fear, loss - we find ourselves entrenched in these dualities. And then there are the birds scattered everywhere, the poet herself willing to fly and sometimes, roost, but always searching for the meaning of self, a time, a place. Like an atlas that guides us, but also leaves us to explore where we ultimately belong. Reader, immerse yourself in this lush, yet raw experience - you will be the richer for it!"

— Anu Mahadev, author of a mouthful of sky

Breath fire water song

Ghost City Press - 2021 Summer Series