Burning Like Her Own Planet - by Vandana Khanna (Paperback)

About the Book

"Against the backdrop of iconic, ancient Hindu texts, Burning Like Her Own Planet reimagines the lives of Hindu goddesses through a contemporary, feminist lens. Told in a series of persona poems and dramatic monologues, the book reinvents these myths into essential stories of love, betrayal, and faith. In these poems, the goddesses question their predetermined fates and examine what it means to be human and divine. They speak in the voices of girls, wives, and mothers, all trying to carve a space for themselves in a world ruled by jealous gods and capricious luck. Overcoming a string of challenges, these goddesses discover their own agency, and the power that comes from telling their own stories. At the heart of the book are the goddesses Sita and Parvati-women who are cast in the role of the "perfect" wife, the "perfect" mother. Here, the goddesses describe their own transformations from naèive, untried women into powerful forces claiming their autonomy. Each in her own way challenges the traditional notions of what it means to be a woman, illuminating the connections between the personal and the universal, the devout and the earthly. The poems highlight the tension between obligation and freedom, examining the consequences for those who try and change the narrative. Whether blessed or cursed, these women, these girl-goddesses, forge their own place within the pages of ancient texts, writing the bitter and the sweet of own lives as they undergo the trials of becoming holy"--

Book Synopsis

Against the backdrop of iconic, ancient Hindu texts, Burning Like Her Own Planet reimagines the lives of Hindu goddesses through a contemporary, feminist lens. Told in a series of persona poems and dramatic monologues, the book reinvents these myths into essential stories of love, betrayal, and faith. In these poems, the goddesses question their predetermined fates and examine what it means to be human and divine. They speak in the voices of girls, wives, and mothers, all trying to carve a space for themselves in a world ruled by jealous gods and capricious luck. Overcoming a string of challenges, these goddesses discover their own agency, and the power that comes from telling their own stories. At the heart of the book are the goddesses Sita and Parvati--women who are cast in the role of the "perfect" wife, the "perfect" mother. Here, the goddesses describe their own transformations from naïve, untried women into powerful forces claiming their autonomy. Each in her own way challenges the traditional notions of what it means to be a woman, illuminating the connections between the personal and the universal, the devout and the earthly. The poems highlight the tension between obligation and freedom, examining the consequences for those who try and change the narrative. Whether blessed or cursed, these women, these girl-goddesses, forge their own place within the pages of ancient texts, writing the bitter and the sweet of own lives as they undergo the trials of becoming holy.

Review Quotes

Finalist: 2024 Housatonic Book Award for Poetry

"Vandana Khanna's third book charts a course from naïve quiescence to the fiery self-belief of a shape-shifting female speaker, sometimes contemporary, sometimes guised as the wifely goddesses Sita or Parvati. ... The book is redolent of saffron, cinders, and wet grass. Each glass-clear metaphor sparkles."
--Sylee Gore, Harriet Books

"To recast myth as expressive, modern, and feminist is so to speak to create a planet that burns or takes up its own space through narrative. From existing voices that can come to represent alternative characters generated by the narrator, a new narrative emerges, challenging the fixity of characters to clarify a oneness that allows pronouns like "we," "you," and "he" to represent the potentiality for connection and fluidity. This wholeness is like a planet or "sun" born out of a stifling force that hinges on the ironic and perhaps metaphorically sensual: "hold your hand tight / against her throat until it throbs" ("Dharma")."
--Ian Koh, Tab Journal

"In her third collection, Khanna skillfully reimagines the lives of Hindu goddesses in a variety of contemporary contexts. Goddesses Sita and Parvati experience first kisses and heady crushes, heartbreak and betrayal, bodily violence, and sacred sisterhood. Full of wildness, transformation, and the hard work of reincarnation, these poems are about girls and women claiming their power despite living in a world trying to break them."
--Laura Sackton, Buzzfeed

"Burning Like Her Own Planet is a poetic autobiography intertwined with contemporary re-imaginations of the Indian goddesses Parvati and Sita: a series of dramatic monologues that explore female devotion and desire, how a woman's fidelity and creativity can become twisted into demands for her own self-sacrifice. Khanna's sonnets--gorgeous, emotionally complex, always dazzling--seduce as much as they startle, speaking back to these ancient South Asian stories to critique and finally redefine what it means to be a girl and goddess."
-- Paisley Rekdal

"Vandana Khanna's gorgeously lush book, Burning Like Her Own Planet, captures all the senses--incense and sandalwood, tar of oily streets, shades of bleeding--and recasts South Asian myths, with their braids and cloaks and dramas, in new ways. The myths and their Gods and Goddesses are held in lyric containers, flitting and flying around in the contemporary world. Khanna is a palpably skilled poet at the line level and her poems sing."
--Victoria Chang

"'Tell me again/I am unforgettable, ' says the goddess-speaker in Vandana Khanna's newest collection. In carefully wrought and patiently lyric poems, Khanna invites us to reconsider the interior lives of some of the most recognizable goddesses in the Hindu pantheon, as well as the concept of a 'goddess' in and of itself. In doing so, we discover, ironically, that to be a goddess actually requires a hefty amount of humanity. 'I can bribe the holy out of you, ' says the goddess-speaker. I find myself not just believing Her, but recovering a sense of my own holiness, too."
--Tarfia Faizullah, author of Seam and Registers of Illuminated Villages

About the Author

Born in New Delhi, India, Vandana Khanna is a writer, educator, and editor. Her third collection of poems is forthcoming from Alice James Books and her previous books have won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, The Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared widely in publications such as the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, The New Republic, New England Review, Guernica, and The Penguin Book of Indian Poets. She serves as a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review.