Motherhood, heartbreak, loss, love — even the tangible: vegetables, beaches, forests and salons, oh, I wanted to write about it all! The brevity of form made it possible to cover a stunning range of landscapes — emotional and physical. Like a jigsaw puzzle, I kept arranging, rearranging lines in poems, addicted to that dose of serotonin that washed over me when a haiku or tanka set well.
Guavas pop-up here as do sunflowers, nieces and lovers. Playful and brooding, heart-breaking and exultant, these poems strobed in watercolor art, revel as much in the lushness of nature as the depth of feelings found within a human heart.
Jesal has always been drawn to making beautiful connections with seemingly disparate ideas. When a haiku juxtaposes two disparate images, out of the synergy jumps a new, nuanced meaning.
If we look at urban existence, it is fraught with dissonance: the push and pull of expectations, the contradictions within roles, and also — unexpected, raw beauty. So, haiku and tanka seem to Jesal as perfect forms for expressing this fractured, beautiful ordinary life.
Written from the perspective of a young woman, the poems in Tanpura’s Strum draw from the themes of love, heartbreak, loss, motherhood, the progression of time and nature. Set on a wide-ranging canvas of the natural world — beaches, forests and urban flora — as well as the domestic — cafés, homes and street life, the poems rest on nectar-like moments that make us feel most alive, impassioned and at other times soul-crushingly human.
Jesal Kanani holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her haiku has been published as an honorable mention in the World Haiku Review and her fiction has been published in The Missouri Review and also nominated for the Best New American Voices 2005 anthology by Harcourt Brace. Her Instagram account @jesalwrites has a lively following of over 56,000, and counting with readers reaching out to write to her every single day. In her past life, she worked in marketing after an MBA from NMIMS and ran Mumbai half marathons. She is the mother of two beautiful daughters and lives with her family in Thane, near Mumbai. She also studies and sings Hindustani classical music.
