Preeti Vangani's Fifty Mothers weaves narrative and elegy around the figure of a mother, the poems unfolding in the speaker's Bombay home. Pierced with joy, with music and sweat, traffic and smoke, the collection layers family dynamics, gender roles, and the pain and pleasure of the speaker's body, while drawing a living, lyric line between the "gone mother" and daughter. These poems are the fiercely loving, grieving, sexual, and always-processing songs for the grown children of mothers living in a world that takes without asking. In the keen, interwoven contexts of grief, physical pain, and lyric poetry, Vangani's Fifty Mothers considers the variety of the phenomenal world and discovers in its living wake an abundance of taste, touch, and mothers.
Preeti Vangani is an Indian poet and writer based in San Francisco. She is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize (2019), winner of the RLFPA Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in AGNI, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and Prairie Schooner, among several other places. Her debut short story won the 2021 PEN/Robert J. Dau Emerging Writers Prize. Vangani has been a resident at Ucross, Djerassi and Ragdale. She has received artist grants from San Francisco Arts Commission and YBCA through which she facilitates poetry workshops rooted in writing grief through joy. She holds an MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco.
"These bittersweet poems elegizing the poet's mother, gone far too young, are sharp-witted yet accessible, heart-rending, wry, and irreverent. They reveal how our deepest griefs are still tied to 'flaming hot, binding, disappearing' sparks of hope, the heart itself moving in directions that constantly surprise. Here, a young woman's hymen is like 'the slit in the pyre // through which [her] mother was set to flames,' the penetration of grief like the first act of making love. But grief is multifaceted, too, fragmentary and slippery as memory. Vangani's collection gathers together all the possible memories and dreams a child can have of a mother, and in doing so, creates a kaleidoscopic document of love and loss, change and creative transition." — PAISLEY REKDAL, author of West: A Translation
"Preeti Vangani's poems are a thick braid of grief and joy, deftly weaving fifty mothers, a gone mother, a father yawning like an animal—all of that an insistent reminder that we never carry just one sorrow, never just one joy. This collection teaches us wild and unruly lessons about how love doesn't quit, even when the body does." — AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, author of Night Owl
"Preeti Vangani's Fifty Mothers unravels and rebraids the elegy with startling tenderness and lyrical rawness: 'I rummage through the squalor of grief.' These poems are layered with invocation as each object, each relationship is placed on the altar of the poetic line. Fifty Mothers asks what it means to mother and to daughter, as a verb dedicated to proximity, to getting closer and closer still. Vangani's imagery is lush and bodily, simultaneously precise and bewildering: 'I have held the pink apples rolling off my mother's cheeks.' I am in awe of Fifty Mothers and its ever-expanding portals of grief, of love, of sensory memory." — JANE WONG, author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything
"Preeti Vangani's beautiful and poignant Fifty Mothers is an elegy for a mother, but also what happens before and after a mother's passing, especially how the speaker grows away, yet closer to the mother figure. Despite the elegiac subject matter, these poems are animated and spunky. 'I have a mother who . . . poured curses hot as melting iron into my original mother's ears for oversalting the potatoes. At the funeral, (she) rocked like a possessed monk reading the Bhagavad Gita over my mother's still-warm corpse. Kill me for wanting to bleach her mouth.' The speaker's perspective is vibrant so that whatever we see through the speaker's eyes is full of color and life." — VICTORIA CHANG, author of With My Back to the World
