Hips Like Holy Rivers (en Inglés) - Yamuna Flaherty

What if desire is not something to conquer, but something holy enough to kneel before?

Hips Like Holy Rivers is a collection of erotic and narrative poems shaped by a daughter of the diaspora returning to India in search of her roots-only to discover they are already growing within her.

Moving through temples and bedrooms, pilgrimages and lovers' arms, these poems trace an apprenticeship to India herself: a land that teaches through heat, ritual, hunger, and touch. As the poet surrenders to love, longing, and the unfamiliar, devotion and desire begin to mirror one another-submission to a lover echoing the deeper yielding required by the divine.

India is not only a setting but a presence: mother, mystic, seductress, initiator. In her gaze, the speaker confronts inherited shame, fractured belonging, and the ache of wanting what both calls and resists her. What emerges is a reckoning with the body as a sacred site, where erotic awakening becomes a form of prayer.