'Akhil Katyal is a gifted poet with a remarkable imagination, capturing the intricate intellectual and emotional complexities of experience. It's incredible how language takes shape in his hands, effortlessly breaking archetypes one after another. The intensity with which he confronts grief and separation is so palpable that it feels impossible to escape.' - VIVEK SHANBHAG

'A poet of traces and silhouettes margined by light. Of promises and hopes lined with a growing dark. Of love and longing and love's likelihood in a land where each one is a city of their own wounds. Where saints can come only to die. A poet who sings of life's eternal grief, sadness, and pain in stunning metaphors, similes, and imagery. Always serene. A maverick you will adore.' - GEETANJALI SHREE

'Akhil Katyal becomes ever more lyrical with every gentle evocation of people and places that are no longer his. In these poems of love and longing, the gossamer filter of his loss colours the world differently but reveals that absence itself is rich and full and suffused with its own aching beauty.' - ARSHIA SATTAR

'Visceral and soft, this book is a greening, and the promise of a greening. You move from poem to poem, following grief and love from cityscape to stolen moment to acute pain of memory: Akhil Katyal's words move you deftly through the land and her languages, carrying a steady diet of devotion, bereavement and balm. It pulled bismillahs from me all along and is a beautiful reminder: poets grow wild and irrepressible in our shared land.' - KYLA PASHA

'Akhil Katyal's poetry is an allegory of urban middle-class life. His poetic sensibility emerges from ordinary, everyday existence, from both its celebrations and struggles. His poems supplement the readers' world of feelings in such a way that they feel, in poem after poem, that their own memories are being rekindled. In his work, Delhi is the key metaphor, one in which he lives and one which he is in constant search of.' - ADNAN KAFEEL 'DARWESH'