Part struggle, part surrender, with a dose of wistful yearning, the book is, at its core, a juxtaposition of wanting to be cured of oneself, and accepting that madness in a mad world, is no illness at all.
Dheda beautifully captures the irony of normalcy, the unifying nature of suffering and loneliness, and the foolish, sustaining nature of hope, in a pulls-no-punches account of sickness and salvation, a testimony to the way our compulsions can be all that keep us from being scrubbed away entirely.”
- Barlow Adams (author of Appalachian Alchemy)
In her stunning debut, Washed Away, Shiksha Dheda has firmly established herself as a poet who can handle personal and delicate subject material with honesty, sensitivity and skill.
The words in this book delve deep into the inner workings of her mind, journeying into the yearning and the confusion of mental disorder. The poetry is segmented into three parts, where she shines a light via her words, simultaneously luminous and hard-hitting.
The poems in this collection are a must-read both for the subject matter and for the sheer artistry. Shiksha Dheda is a poet to watch.
- Sudha Balagopal (author of Things I Can't Tell Amma).
In Shiksha Dheda’s collection, Washed Away, mental illness appears as a stealthy and calculated capturer from which Dheda’s speaker begs to be released. Through her erratic and repetitive prose, Dheda reproduces the paranoia and terror of grappling with mental illness; of realizing that to triumph over mental illness means to defeat a version of the self.
Visually experimental and structurally diverse, this collection keeps us on high alert, holds us in a constant state of disorientation right alongside the speaker.
“How could the same thing / make and / unmake me?,”
Dheda writes.
Sometimes the very fabric of who we are turns on us, starts to unravel at the seams.
- Taylor Byas (author of Bloodwarm)