Sharanya Manivannan

SHARANYA MANIVANNAN

SHARANYA MANIVANNAN was born in Madras, India in 1985, and grew up in Sri Lanka and Malaysia. Her first book of poems was Witchcraft (2008), which was lauded in The Straits Times as being “sensuous and spiritual, delicate and dangerous and as full as the moon reflected in a knife”. She is currently working on a book of stories (The High Priestess Never Marries), a novel (Constellation of Scars), as well as two manuscripts of new poems (Bulletproof Offering and Cadaver Exquisito).

A Pushcart Prize nominee (for “I Will Come Bearing Mangoes”, Rougarou, Fall 2011), her poetry, essays and fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Drunken Boat, Killing the Buddha, Superstition Review, Dark Sky Magazine, Softblow and Pratilipi. A journalist and columnist, she wrote a personal column, “The Venus Flytrap”, for The New Indian Express from 2008 to 2011.

Her first book of poems was Witchcraft (2008), which The Straits Times described as sensuous and spiritual, delicate and dangerous and as full as the moon reflected in a knife. Her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Drunken Boat, Softblow, Killing The Buddha, Full of Crow and Pratilipi; a personal column, "The Venus Flytrap, appears in The New Indian Express. She was the recipient of the Lavanya Sankaran Fellowship for 2008-2009.

Sharanya is noted in particular for her unusual onstage charisma, and she has read her work extensively since 2001 at venues as diverse as colleges, bars, bookstores, embassies, an abandoned pier, a cemetery, the 11^th century Borobudur temple and while sitting in an autorickshaw.
She has lived in Chennai since 2007.

Some of her poems

Distant Star
You slid a pin into my body and
brooched me at a distance, a dwarf
star snared against a night on the
other side of the universe, imagining
yourself a lapidary, setting diamond
upon obsidian, holding your tongue
so that the hooks in your mouth
would not fall. You believe you sleep
the sleep of the guiltless, but it is only
the sleep of the damned, and on the
day when you wake to the sight of me,
ascending before dawn, a planet blue-
burning and beautiful, it is the stones
of your eyes that will sear you, it is your
pins you will swallow, javelined by the
serration of every word you left unsaid.

 

 

Lightning Over Dindivanam Highway

Somewhere along this trail is
the place where you lost me, and the part
   of me that did not outlive that burial.
Even in rear view, I can no more calculate your
   movements than I can fathom
the distance at which you have held me.
The stars small mirrors through gauze,
   giving away nothing -
in my head, memory
   a many-winged wildness.
Wherever you are tonight, perhaps it runs
through you also,     the thing that
   runs through me when I throw open the door
    and step into the storm, the wet of the world
upon my body's own electricity. Perhaps
    it blinds you for a moment too, splinters
down to your bones     perhaps it floods
you with a certain, anamnestic shock.

 

 

Sun-Swallower

 

During the eclipse, it was rumored
that the wildfire in your belly was
the only known source of light
in the universe.
The darkness you found me in
was only the penumbra of the
darkness you would
plunge into me.
What gravity you wielded then.
I came to you not knowing that
the light you held
within yourself was also
the light you withheld
from the world.
There was already darkness in me.
And if not light itself, then
afterglow, and though scorched
forever with the analemma
of your passage,
in the cosmos of my body,
always room for
another sun.

 

 

Keeping The Change
In the French Quarter I wrote you
love poems in yellow ochre,
unscrolled them like a trellis
    of bougainvillea, paper
petals too intense to abandon,
too fragile to keep. How many
shots of thirty rupee citrus vodka
    could we get for a ten dollar
bill? Everywhere we went you
told them to keep the change,
placing it palm-down back on
the table, so when I picked up
your hand to kiss it after, I
smelt metal on your skin.
I don't know what you came
    here looking for, but it
wasn't in the cobblestone,
    or in the rock-bordered
coastline, it wasn't in the
prayer-dome or in anything
you filled those palms
with when I lifted those
dresses I bought on those
streets over my head,
needing you the way a vine
of thorns needs a spine.
    And this much later, a
coffer in my memory still
rattles - your coins too
cheap to care for, too heavy
    to carry.
But I have a weakness
for copper and weight, and
I have collected them all,
handfuls of ore and residue.
They function like paperweights,
   burdening the wisps of things,
their threats to drift away.