Review: Sneha Subramanian Kanta
On Sneha Subramanian Kanta’s Ghost Tracks
by Tyler Truman Julian
Sneha Subramanian Kanta’s chapbook, Ghost Tracks, is a rich collection of poems set in the ecotone, a strange hybrid space both concrete and metaphysical. In these tightly crafted poems, Kanta engages both the sacred and profane in a swirling image-driven narrative that requires a reimagining of both natural landscapes and human-made spaces. Ultimately, these spaces blur in the speaker’s understanding of self and humanity: “The light that creates us assimilates into the bodies of ghosts” (“Everywhere, Ghosts—”). We are ghosts. We are the descendants of ghosts. Ghosts are all around us, and they aren’t just human. They reverberate across our minds and the landscape.
This is a new spiritual awareness, a new doxology, where all things are living, even as ghosts, and all things are holy, unnamable. Time and place overlaps with the time and place of the past in Kanta’s worldview. Existing simultaneously beside scenes of the past leaves little room for misunderstanding one’s impact on a particular place, and this seems to be the crux of Kanta’s poetry in Ghost Tracks. Her speaker explores this sense of cosmic time fully, saying,
move the pastoral into a soft
muscle where ghosts eschew
the body & reformulate it
as a prehistoric sea of aquamarine.
ghosts breathe through coral reefs
each polyps a cluster of prayers
built from larvae & migration.
ghosts reside in this silence
warming spaces with undercurrents
under the abyss of water skin.
(“ghosts with elegies of muscle”)
The images in Kanta’s poems flash quickly across the page, often reshaping from line to line. This is not meant to mislead, but to bring all things—human, animal, and mineral—together across time. It is exactly this harmony that Kanta’s speaker wants us to recognize and cultivate. Amid the natural imagery and oracular musings, the speaker asserts that “every fragment becomes / a joint rhythm from a harmonium,” and in recognizing this, she extends an invitation:
let us move into an orison of breaths a continuum
of unfolding fragments turning whole.
(“Transmigration”, “We rise like wildflowers against the dimming light”)
We would be remiss if we fail to recognize our role in the shaping of the landscape, our fraternity with the greater than human world. Ghost Tracks is a short but powerful reminder of this reality.