This chapbook is in conversation with Shivani Gupta's first collection: my mother is a mixed metaphor. You could start, end & re-enter the landscape of mothers, fathers, daughters between these poems as you’d like.
The politics of entitlement, gratitude, authority, obedience, and abandonment are raked over the coals of Gupta’s syntax as she remixes our expectations of language, fathers, and men more broadly. Together, these poems stitch a sensitive portrait of a particular kind of paternal psyche and the reluctant psyches of those of us who love them, miss them, and carry with us their love and their transgressions alike in assemblages of ourselves amidst our inherited and created cosmologies which, inevitably, contain all the fragrances and textures of their memory.
Ashna Ali, author of The Relativity of Living Well
The collection moves with rare intelligence and feeling, unearthing the speaker’s father’s presence and themes of home with both tenderness and precision. Gupta’s poems balance whimsy with (at times) mathematical rigor, allowing memory, grief, and curiosity to unfold in unexpected patterns. The result is a book that feels deeply personal yet formally daring, intimate in its subject matter and expansive in its imaginative reach. This is poetry that rewards attention: inventive, moving, and beautifully exacting.
Timothy David Rey, author of Zip!
Cumulus is filled with visceral imagery, honest takes, and tender gut punches. Shivani’s work reminds me what it means to hold on to the feeling of a person rather than the details. And yet, the details are so vivid throughout! It’s a body of work that is reminiscent and wholly reverent.
Talicha J., author of Falling in Love with Picking Myself Up
Shivani Gupta is a Chicago-based writer, curator & researcher. Her work has featured globally across BBC, Forbes, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Baby Teeth Journal, Epiphany Magazine, Corpus Callosum, and more. She has served as an In-Surreal-Life fellow, the Development Committee Chair for the Chicago Poetry Center and has been supported by the Narrative Shifts residency. She loves sauces, baked goods, pen-pals, and all-around silliness.
Title: Cumulus
Author: Shivani Gupta
Publisher: Rockwood Press
Released: 2026 - August
Format: chapbook, acid-free paper, silk cover
Pages: 44
Price: $10
ISBN: 978-1-59498-244-6
This chapbook is in conversation with Shivani Gupta's first collection: my mother is a mixed metaphor. You could start, end & re-enter the landscape of mothers, fathers, daughters between these poems as you’d like.
The politics of entitlement, gratitude, authority, obedience, and abandonment are raked over the coals of Gupta’s syntax as she remixes our expectations of language, fathers, and men more broadly. Together, these poems stitch a sensitive portrait of a particular kind of paternal psyche and the reluctant psyches of those of us who love them, miss them, and carry with us their love and their transgressions alike in assemblages of ourselves amidst our inherited and created cosmologies which, inevitably, contain all the fragrances and textures of their memory.
Ashna Ali, author of The Relativity of Living Well
The collection moves with rare intelligence and feeling, unearthing the speaker’s father’s presence and themes of home with both tenderness and precision. Gupta’s poems balance whimsy with (at times) mathematical rigor, allowing memory, grief, and curiosity to unfold in unexpected patterns. The result is a book that feels deeply personal yet formally daring, intimate in its subject matter and expansive in its imaginative reach. This is poetry that rewards attention: inventive, moving, and beautifully exacting.
Timothy David Rey, author of Zip!
Cumulus is filled with visceral imagery, honest takes, and tender gut punches. Shivani’s work reminds me what it means to hold on to the feeling of a person rather than the details. And yet, the details are so vivid throughout! It’s a body of work that is reminiscent and wholly reverent.
Talicha J., author of Falling in Love with Picking Myself Up
Shivani Gupta is a Chicago-based writer, curator & researcher. Her work has featured globally across BBC, Forbes, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Baby Teeth Journal, Epiphany Magazine, Corpus Callosum, and more. She has served as an In-Surreal-Life fellow, the Development Committee Chair for the Chicago Poetry Center and has been supported by the Narrative Shifts residency. She loves sauces, baked goods, pen-pals, and all-around silliness.
Title: Cumulus
Author: Shivani Gupta
Publisher: Rockwood Press
Released: 2026 - August
Format: chapbook, acid-free paper, silk cover
Pages: 44
Price: $10
ISBN: 978-1-59498-244-6
