Creatures of Thirsty

First collection of poems by Payal Yagnik. "Payal Yagnik's Creatures of Thirsty re-creates and permeates the spaces between our waking senses, our lived experiences, and the senses and experiences of the unconscious. In those mutable/mutating spaces percolates love and beauty and wonder and an aching, a thirst, that is hard to fathom. Creatures, human and animal and plant, untamed, unbound in time, rise up, palpable, interact, change, then sink back down, sift away as eyes-and tongues-open again. There are moments of intense revelation-"I was not born to create, I was created to be born. My self is an anti-spiral, it is a constancy of an inert vision" (17). There are moments of defiance: "I am a retired precursor to all things transitory" (71). There are moments of transcendence: "It's beautiful, the way his poetry skips through the notes falling off this skin, like weightless snow crystals" (15). This is a collection of poems you must read with all your senses, but it is also a collection you might read with your eyes closed. Your other senses, then, waking and dream, will transform your experience." -Crag Hill 5 questions for Payal What, if anything, inspires you to write poetry? The very fact that no one reads poetry, makes me feel sort of safe, that I have written all this circular nonsense and even if I solicit readers by coercion, such as parents, siblings, lovers, mates, children, random strangers, the probability that anyone will actually read it and the extended probability that they will make any sense of it whatsoever that somehow betters their lives, is so remote that that very inverse ratio of writing vs readership inspires me to keep writing more. Shamelessly. When you hear the phrase 'creatures of thirsty', what comes to mind? I feel that deep urge to reach out for some good single malt hidden in my closet. After all, that's where I hide all my creatures. Do you work in isolation or are part of a larger writer's community? The great poet Rabindranath Tagore once said "Jodi Tor Dak Shune Keu Na Ase Tobe Ekla Cholo Re" translates as "If they answer not to your call walk alone, If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall, O thou unlucky one, open your mind and speak out alone." I abide by that philosophy, I work alone, incognito. In your writing is there a distinction between prose and poetry? I think it's about visual aesthetics and our set theories on how poetry should form-fit itself. It's all poetry and how we choose to romance with it. Plus I have never had a great relationship with punctuations, shh... "This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put." -Churchill. Are you working on new poems? No. They are working on me.