Author: Arshi Mortuza Pages: 98 Year of Publication: 2026 Price: ₹400 / $15 (USD) ISBN: 978-81-995932-3-7 (9788199593237)

About the Author Born in 1997, Arshi Mortuza is a Bangladeshi poet living somewhere between countries and selves, carried by a childhood spent following her mother’s diplomatic trail. She writes from the edges — womanhood tangled with otherness, mental noise, and the ache of not quite belonging. Her poems dig into myth and memory with a voice that’s both sharp and soft, honest about struggle and longing.

Her father, a professor of English, handed her a love for language that’s still the thread holding her together. She is the author of One Minute Past Midnight (Nymphea Publications, 2022), and her poems have appeared in several publications.

Arshi holds two MAs in English Literature, one from Queen’s University and one from the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, where she also did her BA. By day, she teaches English as a Second Language in Toronto, certified and caffeine-fuelled. At home, she is kept company by her husband and their cats.

About the Book

“There is a wide — and wild — variety of pressed flowers between the covers of this ambitious new collection from a promising and fast-maturing young poet. Daringly combining verse and prose, Arshi can be lyrical, confessional, satirical and visceral as she takes in the personal and the political, the social and the sociopathological, often reworking literary, folkloric and mythological elements in startling new ways.”

Kaiser Haq, Professor of English

Teaser

Ophelia Calls the Crisis Hotline

It’s like I’m being pricked by fantastic garlands from the floral fantasies I have woven of him and I.

No, I am not in immediate danger. You have clearly never loved a mama’s boy.

It’s like I’m swimming against an all-consuming current and I am getting tired, oh, so tired of fighting back.

I drown myself in reveries by the river.

Breathless. I feel water filling up my lungs. The metaphorical kind.

No, I don’t need an ambulance. Unless maybe they can drop me off to a nunnery?

The literal kind.

Contents 79 poems