The eponymous ouroboros, representative of renewal, rebirth, and the cycle of life and death, can also represent eternity, unity, and the interconnectedness of all things. With her ravishing collection, Witching Hour, poet Kashiana Singh has transcended the genre and become something of a seer. Her precision with words, the gradual building of each poem’s universe, is splendidly controlled and perfected, as evidenced by the sparsity of detail required to sustain wholeness in each descriptive in the poem “How to destroy a sunny side up, like an 8-month-old”:

        witch story
        drunk on liquefied
        wells of ovum
        bitter sweet yarrow
        an unwavering resolve
        of incubation

Singh isn’t proselytizing or gloating. Her aim is spiritual, not religious. She wants us to locate our purposing, but she doesn’t judge us in how we achieve this. Her own balanced meaning and salve is hard-won; she’s by no means transcendent of life’s pains. In this, we feel understood, even if our own terrors differ or we do not personally possess the wholeness of family in Singh’s poems. It is possible to believe ourselves capable of achieving wholeness by understanding Singh’s journey—an erasure of sentiment in favor of celebrating life, and thus the resolve of fearing death, interwoven and without end—as seen in “How to be boundaryless like a new born”:

        a shabad
        of revelation, original words of mercy, acceptance
        a bowing inward and into this hatchling god who
        stays wrapped in my cradled orison

The use of metaphor and lush language (that evokes feelings through physical objects and vice-versa) is the art of a wordsmith, confident in her role. Singh has collected her emotions sufficiently to draw you into her multilayered world and leave you to interpret the journey. Does it help that her own rich heritage from her years spent in India growing up, to her transplantation in America, flavors her landscape with such dual-experiences? Absolutely. In “365 wakeful nights (How to pray like a 1-year-old),” this very landscape is glorious and unfettered in its raw summoning of life:

        touch the quartz buddha 		be the fragile
        stone in its garish glory			uncaged child
        wanderer wild

I am bewildered by Singh’s seemingly unstoppable life-force, pouring undiluted into every single poem with measured equality. I search the manuscript for weaknesses, and find only a building, beguiling crescendo. From Earth, to Water, to Ether, this is the circle of life at its most poignant. This redolent expedition is often taken through the exposure of life through the eyes of a young child—Singh’s grandchild, and her observations of his growing-up. Singh’s writing utilizes anaphora and rhetorical devices in addition to metaphor, analogy and simile, to build the lucidity and precise execution—the hallmark of her informed style.

The arrested exceptionalism of children in the West reverts to a time where children are still filled with wonderment and learning, and that wonder is then fashioned into poems of deep observation and devotion through the imagined learnings of a growing child. Artful narratives almost always have both a freshness and innate ambiguity. They represent whilst at the same time avoid overfitting via stereotype. A nudge in one direction and they can veer to kitsch, a nudge in another and they become experimental and unduly alienating. They exist in an uncanny valley of familiarity; the world of art is like a dream that some higher being, more aesthetically sensitive, more empathetic, more intelligent, is having. And by extension, we are having. Existing at such points of criticality, it is these kinds of lovely dream states that are the most advanced, efficient and rewarding in their final conclusion in “Predecease”:

        poems are for birth, war, they fill
        voids left behind by death doulas
        I hoard them to decorate caskets

Beneath the beautiful cover of Witching Hour and its tremulous, profuse poetry, a suspiciously pure ideological concept lies. Under the narrative’s surface, there is a real treasure of something even less varnished than simply a collection. This is a book imagined by its writer, a vessel for hopefulness and love. Like the aesthetic nihilists who aspired to European rationality and rigor, Singh’s writing is unapologetically sanguine and happy, smattered with epigrams and deliberate semantic oppositions that provoke further inquiry. Through a strange trick of fate, we find ourselves in a world that hosts an abundance of hopefulness –not mired down by existential woe, but buoyed by the poet’s dream and her ultimate faith that life is worth living, as seen in “Ode to Kichdi”:

        I remember blood
        petals they say
        bruise easily, like
        achromatic muslin
        beneath 
        a baby
        flowing naked
        hormones unfurled
       like a seizure

There is an incandescent splendor and celebration of life throughout Witching Hour that is unapologetically upbeat and infects the reader with a heady tribute of life, even while Singh acknowledges loss and suffering. She breathes expectation back into the reader, that all years, even those right at the end of the circle, possess value and nourishment and true joy. If there is a message more urgent to hear, I would like to hear it! Singh translates her own life as a river of consolation, and then shares the lessons therein with a gentle, lasting grace.

Witching Hour by Kashiana Singh, Glass Lyre Press, 2024, 136 pages, $19.00, paper.

Candice Louisa Daquin is of Sephardi French/Egyptian descent. She has written for the poetry periodical Rattle, World Literature Today, and The Northern Poetry Review and is Senior Editor at Indie Blu(e) Publishing, and Editorial Associate with Raw Earth Ink. She edits for The Pine Cone Review, Parcham Literary Magazine & Tint Journal. Daquin is co-editor of the award winning anthologies SMITTEN: This Is What Love Looks Like and The Kali Project.