PRAISE FOR TINY EXTRAVAGANZAS

“Dynamic diction is the pulsing heart of Mehta’s excellent second book. Eschewing traditional narrative structures, she opts to create soundscapes that reflect and reinterpret events through a fragmented syntax: “Flingabout night swung in with dead leaves and young bats/ screeching. Acrobatic papers, phonemes scatting.” Mehta’s approach to rhythm and rhyme upends traditional verse forms with phrasing that moves like jazz, both against and within established poetic traditions.” Starred review in Publishers Weekly

“In poems at once viscerally lyrical and intellectually challenging, this new volume from Mehta (Forest with Castanets) investigates how we construct stories from our experiences…Interestingly, despite the gorgeous linguistic impasto, her sensibility tends less to the visual than, uncommonly, the aural; sound and music figure largely in verse boldly reverberating with the “spirit-noise” she folds into the “ordinary pain and ordinary tenderness” celebrated here.” Library Journal

“In meditations on “fortunate times / and quicksand feelings,” Mehta, a poet in New York City, induces a staccato rhythm of poetic effusion, darting from insight to insight, with the graceful and erratic comportment of one “wandering by accident or design / a way to find your tongue.” She probes the “curve and scaw of personality” through lively stylistic devices, like Hopkinsian neologism (“frazzle-heather,” “spirit-drunk”), that reflect her vision of consciousness as “the smack of happening into.” LitHub

“It’s here—middle age, middle of life, the rich and messy marrow of it—that Mehta’s mien sharpens. She’s picking through life and casting her eyes backward and toward the future, not to find the origin but to make meaning from what she has collected and carried with her. This book is as much a poetry collection as it is an accounting…“Life is art is life is art, an endless cycle and Mehta finds herself in the middle of it.” Catherine McNulty, The Los Angeles Review

“Mehta’s work is sophisticated and filled with knockout imagery, lurking empathy, and inventive, joyful-to-read-out-loud language.” Lisa Peet, Executive Editor at Library Journal and editor at Bloom magazine.

“Language that shimmers and reinvents, words that challenge and direct the reader’s attention, lush settings and private musings—these are all foundational components in Diane Mehta’s work, Tiny Extravaganzas. One must finally argue: they are not tiny, they are the world made tangible, cracked open, reimagined, dusted and shined for us to experience as well.” Carlene Guadapee, MicroLit Almanac

“In Baudelarian fashion, Mehta blends life’s grittiest states of being with surrealist observations to create complex steps for readers to follow. In places where “the slug is dead and the snails have retracted,” readers find a dark beauty in the cracks and minute spaces so many tend to ignore.” Nicole Yurcaba, Colorado Review

“What is love?” This age-old question is the main query of Diane Mehta’s Tiny Extravaganzas. In these eloquent poems, Mehta responds to this question, and to artworks, with a tempered euphoria. Rhony Bhopla, Harvard Review

“I’m intrigued by the expansiveness of Mehta’s American lyric, one that both cites and responds to Walt Whitman and his opening of lyric structure, as well as her engagement with the ode, triolets, hymns, landscape descriptions and objects of worship…She writes a lyric that articulates even as it unfolds, unfurls, each poem a combination of short scene and lyric essay.” Rob McClennan

“In any one of my poems from this time in my life, the duration of sounds and the way they’re stacked together are how I determine whether the pacing is working.” Interview in Oldster, fall 2023.

Listen to my interview with Kevin Young on the New Yorker Poetry Podcast, August, 2023. We talk about Eavan Boland’s poem Letter Writing, my poem Landscape with Double Bow, and the poems in Tiny Extravaganzas.

“At first, I wanted to borrow from the rhythms that musicians were using, but then I realized that I could borrow rhythms from my own speech.” On sprechstimme from Writers Recommend, in Poets & Writers

“I’m interested in chasing rhythm and chopping it up, and generally finding new ways to shatter the traditional American sentence with style and verse. I veer from talkative to incantatory, with tone shifts from jazz to lament. I work on a presumption that the sentence is political and a woman must move the sentence in new directions.” 7 Poetry Collections by Women of Color that Shatter the American Sentence, Electric Literature, Oct. 2023.

“Faith is in doubt in many of my poems, though it is through my obsession with Italian medieval and Renaissance paintings, and their Catholic subject matter, that questions about faith present themselves. In my mind, I don’t distinguish between Christian and Jewish theological concerns, because they are monotheistic religions touting stories of prophets who struggle with faith, and it is the struggle that interests me.” On faith, from a Q&A with Yona Zeldis McDonough, editor at Lilith magazine.

Featured poet on Yetzirah: “The liturgical and cantorial rhythms from synagogue shaped some of my language and my long lines, as did Hebrew folk songs and Jain chanting. Just as much of an influence then and now are George Gershwin’s theater songs, Leonard Bernstein’s revved and passionate approach to conducting, and, lately, my new obsessions: György Ligeti’s strangely vast and supernatural classical music and Arnold Schönberg’s poetry song cycle Pierrot lunaire.” November 2023.

Featured in Boston Globe article about Arrowsmith Press poets and our fall launch, November 2023.

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PRAISE FOR FOREST WITH CASTANETS

“In her innovative debut, Mehta explores the connection between place, memory, and sound, offering a vision of “ex-colonial hills,” their “songs lilting,” their “repetitions hell.” Discrete poems and hybrid texts are unified by their vibrant sonic textures…Mehta creates a vision of history that is elliptical and recursive, allowing us to see the continuities and confluences within its “feisty, restless, see-saw spirit.” Publishers Weekly

“A beautiful book…Mehta traces the gentle and eccentric routes of spirituality, with an emphasis on spirit…Prose is tucked among her verse—I hope more poets follow her lead, and be generous with genre—making Forest with Castanets a uniquely arranged collection…She’s a talented essayist, and the hopeful conclusion of her second essay leans into more poems, starting with “Churchgoing”: “If love is divine then what am I / when they are so full of love / excelling?” Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions.

“I am Bombay on the move: Growing up Jewish and Jain.” My essay on Manto’s Bombay in the forties, my own Bombay (“a thriving, diverse metropolis with mazes of streets to wander and open ocean beyond”), and growing up mixed-race and an immigrant: “My temple lives in the sea, with memories and bare feet. / Its gifts are cold water, its only worshipper is me.” Jewish Book Council.

“All writers have a civic responsibility. To write is to take action, and then you have to follow up your words with deeds—practice kindness, form opinions, stand up for others. Artists need to present many sides, but they don’t have to come up with clear answers.” Read my PEN 10 interview at PEN America.

Tune into me talking about the sonnet on the Poetry Society website: “I'm actually sticking to the 14-line structure as a kind of moving ribbon.” The Poetry Society

Poet of the Week at Brooklyn Poets: a poem and an interview. Me on Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away: “The book’s a terrifying puzzle with the tension amped up. There are driving and overlapping forces of good and evil at work and there’s no satisfaction ever, until you think I knew it! and then you realize the horror is interior.” Brooklyn Poets

Humbled to be on this list: “10 Authors who capture what it’s like to grow up in an interfaith family” Hey Alma

A generous review of my book, which focuses on the connection between my poems and prose, with grief as a bridge, at the Jewish Book Council.

10 Authors Who Capture What it’s like to Grow up in an Interfaith Family, at the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle.