Tracing Shunyata
Rina Ramdev
OPEN ZERO: POEMS by Sophia Naz Yoda Press, 2021, 120 pp., 299.00
April 2022, volume 46, No 4

In October of 2017 California’s raging wildfires burnt down Sophia Naz’s home, taking everything, heirlooms, paintings, signed books, inter alia treasures, carelessly strewn around homes that bear witness to living—family photographs, handwritten journals, ‘the material history of a lifetime’. Her 2021 collection of poems, Open Zero is less a math of that uncountable loss, or its archiving—for its calculus, as the obliquely eponymous poem ‘After, math’, muses, ‘must be left at memory’s table’. The poems here map the fire’s aftermaths—of all that follows the event of loss. The fire’s guttings, Naz writes, precipitated a ‘giddy feeling of lightness…shunyata’. In the ‘Indian Rope Trick’, shunyata is ‘Zero, a bridge to know where you hang…neck and neck with nothing’, in ‘Point Blank’ the ‘ovoid void/Naught knot, Sifr Cipher’, and in ‘Bosa’ it wipes the slate clean— ‘in praise of nothingness’. The emptiness profoundly altered her relationship with the present, she says, and the poems here seem to relay re/cognitions of the world, a deeply ruminative retrospective, as it were—in a poetic language that is both linguistically complex and densely layered.

In this it is a relief to see that gutting loss does not segue into cocoonings of self-care, and nowhere does the moment of shunyata, or the liberation she experiences, lapse into banalities of ‘mindfulness’. Shunyata instead, is dialectically traced, never quite allowed a congealing into passive detachment, or narrow solipsistic self-absorption—the poems are not filtered through an aesthetic of mourning or a quietist surrender. In place of self-care’s insular atomizing, Naz’s epiphany works itself out as a reinvestment in the world through both its crises and its wonders—‘ready to picture/the world, her endless music’.

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