Aryanil Mukherjee

Conversation about Withering Aryanil Mukherjee

A In the spring of 2015, a chance poetic conversation began between two poets separated by decades, continents, languages and literary traditions. Colombian poet Cristina Sánchez López was writing from her bed, irreversibly ailed by aortic aneurysm and congestive heart failure leading to multiple complications. With reduced mobility, "breathing room" and daily bouts of bleeding and excruciating pain, Cristina was living a vestige of a life hanging like icicle from a sliver of desperate hope. Writing, when her body permitted, became her mechanism of deconstruction. Almost all of her bedridden work assumed an epistolary form and was directed at Aryanil Mukherjee, a bilingual Indian American poet whose work she had found on the web and began to admire. In response to her poetic inquiry, Aryanil began advancing the conversation in the form of a poem, taking it to crevices of comfort extrinsic to both the plexus of pain and the refuge of nature. A part of this ongoing conversation, conducted in its entirety via texting makes the content of this book.