Birds, Bones, and Melancholia: Musings and Mutterings

By Anushri Nanavati and Alan Karbelnig

A collection of fifty-four free-verse poems revolving around the interiority of melancholia, ranging from chaotic dyads and wearisome days to gut-wrenching despair. Birds have hollow bones, continually flying and falling from highs to lows, and therein lies the inspiration behind both the title and the content. The poems touch the spectrums of stark blacks and whites, with bleak and unrelentingly graphic depictions of the pain, loneliness, and emptiness of mental illness. For those who know it, the writing will ring only too true, for those who know of it, the words are a vicarious immersion in the depths of the human psyche. This is an expose of the intensely personal world of melancholia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Aug 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666778656

Anushri Nanavati

Anushri Nanavati is the founder of Haiku & Hymns classes for children in Ahmedabad, India, where she teaches various subjects, including creative writing, literature, psychology, history, and foreign languages. She is an external instructor for Cambridge International Assessments. Previously working as a psychologist, she has had training in psychoanalysis and Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy. Nanavati also specializes in curriculum design, having developed modules on Social Emotional Learning and Creative Expression for international schools.

Book preview

Birds, Bones, & Melancholia

Musings and Mutterings

Anushri Nanavati

Foreword by Alan Karbelnig

Birds, Bones, & Melancholia

Musings and Mutterings

Copyright ©

2023

Anushri Nanavati. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Resource Publications

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paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-7863-2

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-7864-9

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-7865-6

06/27/23

Cover Illustration Copyright Ankit Prajapati (

2023

)

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: To Whomsoever It May Concern

Sadism

Nude

Movements in Art

We no longer make art.

Naphthalene

Paper Cranes

Hunter

Unfinished

Mezzanine

Devotion

Freudian

Finite

A Week of Night

Reflection

Rainy Days

11:11 Wishes

Epilogue

The Weatherman

Synaesthesia

Chapter 2: Months In Retrospect

Migratory Bird

The End of Summer

Anything But September

The Turn of the Season

Winter Tales

January

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

This Winter

Calendar

In Hindsight

Foresight

Chapter 3: Soliloquies

Unfold

Smoky Nights

Disability

An Iron Will

Frozen

The Silence

Reflection 2.0

Mauve and other Colours

Cacophony

Voice

The Cartography of Anatomy

The Ward

The Bonekeeper

Moonlight

Moonlight 2.0

Ennui

Sterilisation

To those who gave me wings to fly whenever I fell

Foreword

Like a flower from fetid fields of the chaotic, over-crowded yet financially crucial city of Ahmedabad, India, Anushri’s poetry blossoms with an unexpected tenderness. Perhaps her upbringing in the pandemonium speaks to a core paradox: Anushri’s work displays the feminist empowerment granted by an excellent education—in psychoanalysis, in foreign languages (with fluency in five), and in curriculum development. On the other hand, and