Lithium and other fairy tales, by Ashwini R. Gangal

Poetry, prose, chapbook, 20 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

This book is a collection of three types of poetry — haiku, rhyme, free verse — and a good ol’ short story.

These seven pieces of work are like seven stray threads sticking out of a garment or carpet, betraying the fabric it’s made of and the dye it is soaked in. The author’s poetry and prose lay bare her present day interiority. Her words come from a place of passionate inquiry into what it means to be among the most complex life form on the planet.

Themes that inform this work include migration, madness and misanthropy. "Lithium," the poem this collection is named after, is inspired by a book titled Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character, beautifully written by Kay Redfield Jamison.

This is Ashwini’s third chapbook. Her other titles include Hormonal House (fiction) and Yersinia Pestis (poetry).

Ashwini R. Gangal is a California-based journalist. She revels in the good fortune of living two lives, first as an Indian who grew up in India’s city of dreams, Mumbai, and more recently, as an Indian immigrant in suburban America. Home, she has come to believe, is not a place at all, but a mirage, a memory, a mood, a misunderstanding. She loves reading about microbes, madness and other morbid truths about the human condition.