My Body is Not a Vessel by Shamayita Sen, following her debut publication For the Hope of Spring: Hybrid Poems, is a sometimes scorching, sometimes brooding, but always fascinating collection of poems that not only traverses the terrains of female suffering but also plumbs those two universal signifiers of human experience, grief and hope.
The slim book is divided into three sections titled ‘My Body is a Metaphor’, ‘In Mourning’ and ‘Homecoming’. The title of the first section is a clever sleight-of-hand, for the poems that follow make it clear that whatever be the metaphors inscribed upon the female body, they are rooted in the primordial zone of bodily experience. This experience, as the feminist in Sen clearly knows, is one that skews disproportionately towards the distressing. For example, in ‘Consent’, the speaker remarks,
I’ve been told my body is a vessel
that must bear wounds (p. 14)