In Ramayya’s visionary poetry, the body assumes as many forms as love produces states: attraction and repulsion, excitement and exhaustion, selfishness and the dissolution of self.

States of the Body Produced by Love is structured according to 19^th century lexicographer Sir Monier Monier-Williams’s definition of smaradaśā or ‘love-state’

“स्मरदशा smaradaśā, f. state of the body produced by love (ten states are named: joy of the eyes, pensive reflection, desire, sleeplessness, emaciation, indifference to external objects, abandonment of shame, infatuation, fainting away, death)

Now I understand love and devotion to be productive and destructive: the nationalistic love that sanctions violence against those who do not fit the nation’s image of itself; the religious love that justifies turning away from the structures of the material world to sustain the status quo of injustice; the familial love that does not admit the selfishness of family values; the romantic love that entails the loss of self and the dissolution of self-containment.

Now I return to India, in love and shame and anger, these repeated returns enabling the repeated beginnings that follow.“ – Sir Monier Monier-Williams

Love is a many-headed snake in Nisha Ramayya’s debut poetry book, twisting its way through devotion, sacrifice and bliss. Ranging across genres and forms, mixing poetry, prose, autobiography and theory, States of the Body Produced by Love conjures an opalescent world by way of heritage, ritual and myth. Thousand-petalled lotuses bloom inside skulls, goddesses with dirty feet charm honeybees, strains of jazz standards bleed into anti-national anthems. Desire, eroticism and care contain the possibilities of shame, fury and destruction. Moving towards and away from love, being translated and transformed by love, suffering under love and refusing its power.