"Where fear collides with the little shield of love."Manahil Bandukwala's second collection of poems is a meditation on love during times of social and political upheaval. As a sunflower's growth reaches toward the sun, so, she suggests, is a lover's growth compelled by the gravitational pull and soul-light of their beloved. Many of these poems are in conversation with other poets and artists, creating a lineage of call and response. Against a backdrop of terrestrial crisis, come, spend your precious minutes in love's Heliotropia, where we are magnetized by the unfathomable dark matter of another person, and know ourselves as celestial bodies flowering in spacetime, together."Intergalactic yet deeply earthly, intertextual yet wonderfully original..." - Mikko Harvey, author of Let the World Have You

Winner 2022 Alcuin Award * 2023 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Shortlist MONUMENT is a conversation with Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal, which moves her legacy beyond the Taj Mahal. MONUMENT upturns notions of love, monumentalisation, and empire by exploring buried facets of Mumtaz Mahal's story. The collection layers linear time and geographical space to chart the continuing presence of historical legacies. It considers what alternate futures could have been possible. Who are we when we continue to make the same mistakes? Beyond distance, time, and boundaries, what do we still carry? "A profound evocation of unbelonging." - Bhanu Kapil "Bandukwala is a lyric truth-teller." - Farzana Doctor "A sensitive, urgent, astonishing, masterful, and necessary debut." - Doyali Islam