Language of the Wound is Love, poems by Megha Sood
“Language of the Wound is Love” primarily deals with poems reflecting the pain and loss of first-generation immigrants losing their primary language while trying to fit their hyphenated identities. It highlights the fact that every wound inflicted because of gender or sexual-based discrimination, the feeling of loss and belonging of immigrant families, the pain of isolation during the pandemic, or discrimination based on gender or color, has a hunger for love. Its language is love. Love is the acceptance everyone is feverishly seeking in this topsy-turvy world, hence the title. This collection has been divided into five sections namely “Language Lost”, “Blood on Our Hands”, “Every Pain Has a Story”, “A Collective State of Disbelief ” and “Brotherhood”. The opening section “Language Lost” deals with the poems reflecting the pain and loss of first-generation immigrants losing their primary language while trying to fit their hyphenated identities. It talks about the pain deeply experienced by people of color and other minorities living in a racist and xenophobic society. The collection depicts the isolation felt by the world living their own version of realities during the pandemic and the longing effect on its social-emotional bonding. This collection highlights my journey, gives it a voice, and strengthens the fact that every wound has a language that needs love, and patience intermixed with sagacious interpretation.
“Language of the Wound is Love” primarily deals with poems reflecting the pain and loss of first-generation immigrants losing their primary language while trying to fit their hyphenated identities. It highlights the fact that every wound inflicted because of gender or sexual-based discrimination, the feeling of loss and belonging of immigrant families, the pain of isolation during the pandemic, or discrimination based on gender or color, has a hunger for love. Its language is love. Love is the acceptance everyone is feverishly seeking in this topsy-turvy world, hence the title. This collection has been divided into five sections namely “Language Lost”, “Blood on Our Hands”, “Every Pain Has a Story”, “A Collective State of Disbelief ” and “Brotherhood”. The opening section “Language Lost” deals with the poems reflecting the pain and loss of first-generation immigrants losing their primary language while trying to fit their hyphenated identities. It talks about the pain deeply experienced by people of color and other minorities living in a racist and xenophobic society. The collection depicts the isolation felt by the world living their own version of realities during the pandemic and the longing effect on its social-emotional bonding. This collection highlights my journey, gives it a voice, and strengthens the fact that every wound has a language that needs love, and patience intermixed with sagacious interpretation.
“Language of the Wound is Love” primarily deals with poems reflecting the pain and loss of first-generation immigrants losing their primary language while trying to fit their hyphenated identities. It highlights the fact that every wound inflicted because of gender or sexual-based discrimination, the feeling of loss and belonging of immigrant families, the pain of isolation during the pandemic, or discrimination based on gender or color, has a hunger for love. Its language is love. Love is the acceptance everyone is feverishly seeking in this topsy-turvy world, hence the title. This collection has been divided into five sections namely “Language Lost”, “Blood on Our Hands”, “Every Pain Has a Story”, “A Collective State of Disbelief ” and “Brotherhood”. The opening section “Language Lost” deals with the poems reflecting the pain and loss of first-generation immigrants losing their primary language while trying to fit their hyphenated identities. It talks about the pain deeply experienced by people of color and other minorities living in a racist and xenophobic society. The collection depicts the isolation felt by the world living their own version of realities during the pandemic and the longing effect on its social-emotional bonding. This collection highlights my journey, gives it a voice, and strengthens the fact that every wound has a language that needs love, and patience intermixed with sagacious interpretation.
In Language of the Wound is Love, Megha Sood amplifies a constancy of the past within a shifting sense of place and thirst for belonging. Throughout this gutsy, incandescent collection, Sood often investigates quandaries of thought within the physical self: our tongue moves in a way our body can't decipher in grief. Her intimate grief and fury mirror our collective bewilderment, while nonetheless evoking a stubborn tenderness for the world— I can still feel the hallowed existence of everything around me—and redemption: my granny combing my hair and making trails of kindness. From one line to the next, these poems shiver against each other like ripples of memory across time.
—Stephanie JT Russell, Dutchess County Poet Laureate, author, One Flash of Lightning: A Samurai Path for Living the Moment
Megha Sood’s moving new poetry collection, Language of the Wound is Love eloquently conveys the depths of grief frequently experienced by immigrants of color in the US due to the dominant culture rarely allowing them to truly feel at home as they endeavor to create lives here. The ineluctable pain that comes with never truly belonging thrums throughout, and Sood deftly conveys how rejecting, dehumanizing, and isolating “the other” is not only cruel, it’s illogical. For what are people at their core, but souls? The beautiful, shining soul has no color, no ethnicity. It knows no barriers. These elegant, sophisticated poems engender empathy as they remind us to look past what makes one an outsider and embrace the being inside. Find your humanity. See yourself. It’s a beautiful book.
—Toni Ann Johnson, Flannery O’Connor award-winning author of Light Skin Gone to Waste.
Megha Sood has outdone herself as a poet in her latest collection, Language of the Wound is Love. Her language is expansive, stretched to hold the unfolding personal and global suffering and offer us a reprieve in the poet's imagination. These are poems of longing, desiring to set the world right.
— Pramila Venkateswaran, Suffolk County poet laureate, and author of We are Not a Museum.
Megha Sood is no stranger to the terror of hunger. And what poet has not felt the hunger of a poem? Rather than be diminished by it, Sood is propelled to write aloud, adopt a language of her own to face contradictions, and be a faithful witness to the real world. This knowledge is her salvation as she finds home in the attar-perfumed folds of her clothes, and her henna and turmeric-tainted fingers.
—Maria Lisella, 2020 Fellow Academy of American Poets and Queens Poet Laureate
We must support each other and empathize with each other, wrote Maya Angelou because each of us is more alike than we are unalike; poet and literary activist Megha Sood writes into such expansive abstractions of love, belonging, hope, migration, and grief with enviable sincerity. At her finest, as in the poem "Deciphering the Madness, the thick rope of time goes through the wide-open mouth of a blind wall while garbage trucks ping and finches weave nests in the oak. Sood uses her platform admirably to advocate for equity and social justice.
—Dr. Ravi Shankar, Pushcart Prize-winning author of 17 books
Language of the Wound Is Love is a deeply personal journey through the physical and emotional wounds in the process of healing. The poet's storytelling is strong with its vulnerable turn of phrase and connection from one piece to another. Once I started, I couldn't put it down until the final outreach to hope.
—RescuePoetix | Susan Justiniano, Poet, Author, Spoken Word Artist, Playwright, Advocate
There is an urgency to these poems written while bombs fall, emotional axes swirl, dilemmas sear. Sood addresses essential questions. What happens when one immigrates? How to live while your brother and sister are being slaughtered elsewhere on this one earth? Yes, the wound is love, suppurating, challenging, insisting on its poetry, and the healing that comes from bloodletting.
— Indran Amirthanayagam, author of Seer.
Megha Sood( She/Her) is an award-winning Asian-American author, poet, editor, curator, and literary activist from New Jersey. She earned her Postgraduate Degree in Computer Application (M.C.A)and Bachelors in Computer Sciences (B.Sc.) from India.A Literary Partner with “Life in Quarantine”, at Stanford University. Her literary partnership "Life in Quarantine" with Stanford University has been presented at the Open Education Global Forum 2020 and received mention in the Stanford Daily newspaper. Her works have been supported by the National League of American Pen Women, VONA, Kundiman, Dodge Foundation, and Martha Vineyard Creative Writing Institute.
Her four poetry collections include the award-winning ("My Body Lives Like a Threat", FlowerSong Press, 2022) and (My Body is not an Apology", Finishing Lines Press, 2021). She was inducted as an honored listee for the 125-year-old Marquis Who's Who. A 2020 National Level Winner for the Poetry Matters Project, and a Four-Time State Level Winner for the NAMI NJ Dara Axelrod Poetry Award. Recipient of “Certificate of Excellence” from Mayor Stephen Fulop, Jersey City. Member of National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW), The Artists Forum (USA), ArtPride (NJ), and United Nations Association-US Chapter. She has also been chosen as a featured poet for the 2024 Dodge Poetry Festival.
Her widely anthologized poems, essays, and other works discuss her experience as a first-generation immigrant and woman of color. Her 900+ works have been widely featured in print, online journals, public exhibits, and anthologies including the Poetry Society of New York, MS Magazine, NYPL, Pen Magazine by American Pen Women, Journal of NJ Poets, Dime Show Review, Panoplyzine, PBS American Portrait, NPR, WNYC Studio, etc and numerous universities including Stanford University, John Hopkins, Howard University, George Mason, Temple University, etc. Her poem "Deciphering the Madness" was also broadcast on WNYC-Studio Morning Edition as part of National Poetry Month in April 2022.
Her co-edited anthology “The Medusa Project” and other works have been selected to be sent to the moon in 2025 in two separate rocket missions as part of the historical LunarCodex Project in collaboration with NASA/SpaceX. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and her 14-year-old son. Find her at https://linktr.ee/meghasood
Poetry Collection ” My Body Lives Like a Threat” by Flower Song Press,2022
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