Thirteen Days to Let Go

In Thirteen Days to Let Go, Pramila Venkateswaran joins her stunningly resonant voice to the classic theme of mourning in lush, vivid images and powerful metaphors. Her poems set a table for the hungry grief that follows death, feeding the reader’s spirit with poetry that sustains. Like the rice and ghee given to the fire to honor the ancestors in the Hindu rite she describes, Venkateswaran’s words are nourishment for the body and the spirit; for the dead and for the living left behind. Thirteen Days to Let Go is the kind of text that should be read again and again, offering palpable hope in times of darkness, as “This precious light / we store for famine;” the kind of healing that makes letting go possible.
—Annabelle Moseley, 2014 Long Island Poet of the Year and author of A Ship to Hold The World and The Marionette’s Ascent
Thirteen Days to Let Go is flush with ambivalence, both a reminiscence of—and argument with—Pramila Venkateswaran’s dying father, as evidenced in “Love Letter”: “Would you judge me as selfish, / wanting to see you dead, rather / than in a hospital bed with tubes / piercing you?” She then answers her own query: “I know you would want to / make the decision about leaving.” The masterpiece of the collection, though, is the titular poem, its thirteen sections mirroring the thirteen-day ritual of Indian mourning. Throughout this work, one senses the polarities that tug and heave the poet in opposing directions, her convoluted relationship with a patriarch with whom she may or may not reconcile, an entity no longer present, yet who figures prominently amidst her feelings and judgments. This collection, a threnody to her father, illuminates our own conflicts with aging parents, as well as our own looming mortality.
—Ed Stever, Poet Laureate, Suffolk County, New York and author of The Man With Tall Skin
It is unusual to find a voice so eloquent, expressive, and gifted with poetic skill that the reader wants to re-read the poems, to savor once again, the magic that is happening on the page. This will be your experience when you read Thirteen Days to Let Go, Pramila Venkateswaran’s fifth collection of poetry. It is a reverent poetic meditation on transformation and resurrection; a grand utterance grateful for grief, and joyful for the redemption that it grants. These poems flourish with elegant imagination and clarity of thought; they are reflections that embrace the common ground of tradition, love, grief, filial devotion, and through their emotional honesty, connect us to each other.
—Gladys L. Henderson, 2010 Long Island Poet of the Year and author of Eclipse of Heaven.