Night breaks apart, like pomegranate seeds in my palm by Aakriti Kuntal is so much more than a mere collection of poems. It is a beguiling resplendence so outrageously beautiful, that it stuns with its numinous succulence. An eros of audible color suffuses this work beginning with a “vow hibernating on the crest of lip.” A simmering font of nerves churns in the soft underbelly of the poet’s extravagantly naked vulnerability, radiating crumpled whispers, fading pulses, composted inheritances, and lonely travails. The reader enters this slow storm of lyric-infused rain with the tear-soaked ecstasy of a baptized pagan, akin to an ontological agnostic whirling in a melodic trance. Aakriti’s poetry is best approached improvisationally, with epistemological humility, in order to recognize its spiritual force, and its visceral power to annihilate and renew received systems of knowing.

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The book is sectioned into emotional chakras, named provocatively after processes of seeding, the primordial fabric of sensory innards, and angelic monsters who haunt the mind and body. Fevered visions, and jagged psalms flow into its distilled darkness in a molten glow. Bulb unveils the “sliced breath of day” and “sly tongue of life,” while imploring existential gods with a resounding lament:

Is acknowledgement an affirmation of life?

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We watch a bumble bee “snipping the air,” feel “velvet saliva over meditating skin,” dread “growing tentacles of uncertainty” and vicariously experience “luscious lunacy.” Surreal visions ensue: a dream “running barefoot,” a heart rising to “throttle the stunned air,” and a metaphorical lotus swirling “amid tectonic suns.” Inhabiting the world at a perceptual level is the conventional mode of sense-making for most of us. But sensorial contact with Aakriti’s syllabic vibrations changes the circuitry of one’s attention as she initiates an inter-subjective journey, a polyvagal toning of sorts, Her unique sonic recipe of agency, affect, and minute observation augments hermetic cognition. The act of seeing morphs into elemental euphony, a kind of astral music unfettered by language, as the reader’s expressive impulses become animated by the rhythmic tendrils of her utterances.

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Scab arising from the “steam of all perspiring things” explores the epistemics of pain and the braiding of temporalities. “Transparent skeletons” and the “slippery face of night” are dreamily diaphanous presences in this bristling air of disquiet. Something sacramental emerges from the depths of this mad empire where all is nothing, as debilitating malaise slowly results in a rebellious wisdom:

…death is a compound,
not a finality or an accident
But dilution,

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             A repetition

             Until absorbed, until accepted

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Flagella transforms a barren plain into a dream-weaver’s map of trickster energies. A serpent ascends as “the mud’s only wail” slithering luminously like an “orphaned star.” The poet’s gaze follows the wind “its only lover,” while a blood clot “coils into a watery dream.” “Anonymous wanderers” are linked in an eco-erotic, headily pheromonic transversal intimacy. “A poem is a dance” says Aakriti, like the “aftermath of a moth” luring the reader into sanctuaries of punctuated space on the page. Eyes “like whales in an invisible sea” create the hermeneutics of her faith which lyrically trace the leap from seeing to beholding. A plurality of quantum ecologies converge like a grand ripple in the ocean of her consciousness. A name becomes the “bearer of kisses” in a seemingly holy consonance. Its lone voyage into a vast sky of magnetic absences is hauntingly beautiful, and provides a gestational home for emergence to cultivate itself into manifestation:

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You,                   This poem’s faraway lover,
        its carbon home,

This poem
seeks
you
 

Synapse unravels thoughts as sentinels of survival, bathed in a saffron halo like pilgrims. A corporeal dialogue ensues, as “umbilical song” cascades into the harsh redness of a wound and unspools the adaptive, experimental, and interrogative meanderings of neurological expression. Imagery renounces the centrality of the self, as the poems cloaked in etheric wildness roam in a strangely familiar realm:

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A warm, pulsating concussion
On time’s white gleaming forehead

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“Condensed lavender time” is a fragrantly resonant opening into Aakriti’s wondrous capacity to reveal poems within poems, and the fact that poetry is not species-specific! Ordinarily, one uses rational argument to dispel the terrors of the unknown, but her poetics of disintegration seem to involve invisible hieroglyphs on ancient walls of sentient awareness - a vibrating seance in the heart’s quarry. No meme farms operating here, no cloud-based influencers, just the id dancing in the solar belly of light. A rare feat in a time were folks worship at digital altars, often ignoring the vibrating fount of creativity within.  Shape-shifting is sacred in Aakriti’s world, as the stranger within talks to the void, and the fortress of constructs inexorably breaks down:

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The windowpane,
a box of volatile wings,
floats between cement cubes-
perforated.
sculpted,
God’s eternal face carved into translucent sleep.

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Aakriti sees herself “dwindling in the embrace of estrangement” as she travels along “barbecued roads” to the hospital, composing a self from fragments in the fertile solitude of memory’s desolate corners. Metabolic scripts play out in spillage of pomegranate juice tracing a cartography of severance, misty vistas strewn with “moon-licked beauties,” and untamed tremblings in “holy darkness.” Words turn into nomadic prayers walking an uncharted route of interiority:

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The nose of darkness
the shifting saliva of light
Between their wiggling gasps
of opium lovemaking - the periscope of life.

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“Wailing days” swathed in layers of yearning are laced with the liminal nectars of Aakriti’s prolific imagination, as they land on the reader’s radar with clinical precision:

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I am - again,
deducted and multiplied
picking my thoughts with a pair of tongs,
bangles of colors encircling nodes.

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As the self dissociates from ego, the barrier between subject and object fades, and the poet reveals herself as an inherently porous entity - a chemical soup of flesh, frothy air, and blood. Aphoristic declarations such as “time is a crime” and “love even swallows itself” strum the chords of one’s comfortably numb senses, compelling a new complex curvature of impressions - a messy magic, if you will. Avian companions with “flammable pink flakes” on their necks, their feathers ”a yarn of mauve skin” appear like glowing cuneiform creatures in hospital room windows, and spin out their own operatic logos:

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In my balcony, a single sparrow -
the chirping so sweet it splits my skin.

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A bed turns into a feral dwelling, its sheets a “bat cave” in the “whiteness of night.” A “deep chamber of dreams” features a “fatal sunset” a “dead God.” This section dissolves into a dimension where gravity itself conspires to pull the heart and send it hurtling into a precipitous descent from “heaven’s arch.”

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Cytoplasm opens up a dense forest of prose poems set in an underland where “the dark intestine of being” is charged with” cataclysmic air” and “thirsty red dust.” Typographical capers tracing the trajectory of a blood droplet appear as headers with ominous acoustics using the “trumpet of death” as a backdrop. “Tender outrage” at the finite universe of physical things breaks out in the “eccentric song of the heart.” Journeying through the crimson innards of a hibiscus flower, feeling one with its “wet breath” Aakriti becomes the voice of a gaping wound:

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 is, if you ask me, is the closest one comes to life…

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The “unspeakable word on the cliff of my throat” is the intangible tissue that Aakriti uses to weave what flows from “water’s large tongue.” A synaptic dance induced by the feverish twilight of infirmity fills the vacuum of stasis. Prayer assumes a vibratory glow in minute anatomies and unusual similes:

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It is a fly causing trepidations in the extravagant suspension of time. 

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“Fuchsia blades” and a “dreaming tree” mingle with “copious absences” to form a fluid architecture of “osmosis, exchange and dance” creating a mesmeric visual murmuration. Dynamic chimeras and excitable mediums populate these prosaic tunnels of life in the “flute of being.” A stone with the “night stored in its belly” is a poetic metric reflecting the gradients of awareness. Origami becomes a language of fragile logos, a “paper dream” fueled by the “incense of breath”:

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I own nothing and possess it all. I am the very wings of destiny.

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Aakriti’s meditation on a woodpecker “swiveled by biology,” the “buttercup shadows” of dream, and a cluster of violet flowers nesting in the “sky’s cleavage” reflects her democratization of consciousness, her innate ability to condense imaginal experience into word-dew, and her energetic poetic sovereignty over nature’s myriad alignments.

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There is no propositional order in Aakriti’s flow, instead there is a gorgeous drift into a riverine animacy, almost bio-electric in its configurations, subtly honing in the reader a novel capacity of dimensional perception. That is the edgily futuristic essence of this poet’s voice - like an otherworldly lyre sounding its music in the ether, and blessing the earth with its galactic eye. The collection closes with Fringe which creates within its sense of endings, a living lineage of vibrations. Interpreting Aakriti’s poems feels like a sacred transgression, inspiring as they are in spiritual scope, and alluring in their otherworldly music. Her gauzy word-trails reveal  a vision that is meta-aware:

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In the floating shadow,

A recollection of being

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At the close of the collection, a “suspended lotus” hovers like a signifier in bloom, encompassing all.