Dr. Monica Mody
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BOOKs | CHAPBOOKS | ANTHOLOGY CHAPTERS | ARTICLES AND ESSAYS | POEMS IN ANTHOLOGIES | Collaborations | Reviews | GUEST BLOG ESSAYS | POEMS IN LITERARY JOURNALS


 

BOOKS

WILD FIN
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Weavers Press, 2024
Get a copy | Order from Asterism
​Praise and reviews
Wild Fin weaves the reader through an eclectic warp and weft of grief and fury, rupture and suture, mysticism and calls for climate and social justice. . .  These poems demonstrate "writing's capacity to un-silence" with "words [that] flock together into language that will change skies.
​Maw Shein Win
​Wild Fin feels like home while teaching us that home is a fabulation.
Carrie Hunter
This book expands our understanding of how transspecies compassion must learn to swim in the dark and deep water of human migrations.​
​Divya Victor
BRIGHT PARALLEL
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Copper Coin, 2023
Purchase within India | International Orders
Praise and reviews
Everywhere inside this book I found soil—living, dying, composting, growing, resting, and restless. I emerged from every page with some of it in my hands.
Sumana Roy
Language bare as a rock, yet rich with the memory of ancestral call and body response, Monica Mody’s poems hold me steady through peril.
​Jeet Thayil
The voices we hear in Bright Parallel invite us to attend to the call of other beings, the call of things. These are the voices of oracles, priestesses, witches, guardians of spring, flame, shrub and tree. They offer us belonging rather than alienation, enchantment rather than despair.
Ranjit Hoskote
Mody’s attunement to the natural world is precise, with room for both ‘mineral root’ and ‘whale praise’; a shocking openness to the elemental so that we, too, can imagine being flooded with the ‘courage of constellations’. Her feministic enquiry is utterly embodied . . . she draws all to the brink of the motherpool.
Sampurna Chattarji
KALA PANI
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1913 Press, 2014
Praise and reviews

I keep handy a short list of writers who teach you that dreaming of a new politics is never enough. A new politics always needs a new language. That is the lesson offered by Arundhati Roy and Tony Kushner. After reading KALA PANI, my list also includes Monica Mody.
Amitava Kumar
Gender, genre, national identity, multiple languages, and the body’s “natural” borders are all debased and reworked in this queer, unstable mix, which releases energy as it forms and breaks down and forms again.
​Joyelle McSweeney
With great inventiveness, Mody wends narrative around and within narrative, as though the bonds and bounds of story could twist, Houdini-like, to effect their own escape. . . . As witty and lightfooted as this book is, the shapeshifting characters function in an admonitory way, for no one ever truly gets away.
Elizabeth Robinson in ​Rain Taxi

 

CHAPBOOKS

ORDINARY ANNALS
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above/ground press, 2021
Buy the chapbook
In her signature resonant and deeply grounded poetic style, Mody examines the limits of the body in all its many senses—as creative work, as organism, as site of protest, as political subject, as resident (of community, of nation, of habitat, of ecosystem, of Earth)—resulting in a prescient work that. . . “falter(s) towards a ripple, a ground of healing.”
Iris Law on Lantern Review Blog
Ordinary Annals is the work of a poet attuned to the entanglement of word and world, memory and moment, love and suffering.
Zoe Tuck
SURFACES: A BILINGUAL CHAPBOOK (Sarai, 2010)
TRAVEL & RISK
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Wheelchair Party, 2010
A cheeky romp in the conditional (nearly every line begins with “if”), the long poem that comprises Travel & Risk explores notions of agency, risk, and migration. Mody writes with skill and great attention to the music of her lines, rendering poetry that is imagistically sharp and sonically expansive.
Iris Law

 

ANTHOLOGY CHAPTERS

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Listening to the Bigger Story: The Dagara Spiritual Technology of Divination on Turtle Island
​"Listening to the Bigger Story: The Dagara Spiritual Technology of Divination on Turtle Island" in Mysticism and the Margins: From the Hip-Hop Underground to the Psychedelic Reformation, ed. David M. Odorisio (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025).

Divination—one of the most significant traditional spiritual forms in the African and African diasporic way of life—is readily labeled in the theory of religion as a form of “magic” and therefore an other to “mysticism.” Looking at it from African and African diasporic epistemologies, particularly as signified among the Dagara people and in the Dagara worldview shared into the African diaspora and other communities by Malidoma Somé, this chapter offers an appraisal of divination as a mystical practice. Even as it is sometimes strategically sought to address pragmatic concerns, the ethos of poetic transformation in divinatory practice remarks on the crisis of human intelligibility; frays constructed barriers separating mind, body, spirit, and community; and restores unitive consciousness. The discursive space divinations open for the participation of ancestors, deities, and spirits allow the diviner and the divinee to dialogue with mystical knowledge and uphold a mystical view of reality and subjectivity that is continually negotiating “other worlds” that denote belonging, not otherness, within this cosmological frame. The chapter elucidates and honors these understandings through the author’s own practice as a diviner taught within the Dagara-in-the-West tradition and proposes that divination intercedes in the study of spiritual realities as the persistence of an anti-colonial imagination.​

Read More

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Serpent, Earth, Healing, Initiation
"Serpent, Earth, Healing, Initiation" in 
The Land Remembers Us: Women, Myth, and Nature--Proceedings of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, Vol. III, eds. Mary Jo Neitz and Sid Reger (Women and Myth Press, 2020).

The chapter proposes reconnecting with and decolonizing earth/snake energies for the borderlands feminine, as a way to heal her pasts, presents, and futures. Priestessing Nagadevi's shrine and visiting a serpent temple in southern India present me with two models of working these sacred energies. I conjecture that the access to psychic borderlands once enjoyed by serpent priestesses is now controlled and patrolled by patriarchal authority. Still, serpents come from a part of us/the world that is wild, untamable. These ancient energies can be unlocked by transforming the trauma and stress stored in our bodies, spine, and nervous systems. Remantling the serpent energies liberates a new arc of the possible for the body, intimacy, and futurities. Neuroscience research shows that memory too is serpentine—what and how we remember changes the possibilities for the future encoded in the past. The chapter weaves in multiple genres—including critical prose, personal reflection, and poetry—to make space for epistemologies from plural centers of consciousness. A synergistic counterplay of genres allows for a non-assimilationist, border-crossing hermeneutics.
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More Info


 

ARTICLES AND ESSAYS

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When Yoginis Appear with Animals: Animistic Relational Elements and the Non-Dual Matrix
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"When Yoginis Appear with Animals: Animistic Relational Elements and the Non-Dual Matrix," Tarka Journal, Issue 7: On Tantra, March 2023

Other-than-human animals often appear alongside anthropomorphic goddesses and gods in Hindu iconography, as their vahan (mounts). This syntagmatic placement can, within an anthropocentric conception of the divine, suggest not only an unequal relation between deity and animal, but also that beneficence flows from deity to animal, unidirectionally. The lineages of these depictions of the relationship between animal and divinity go back to ancient Harappan cultures. The iconography of Yoginis in the medieval period continues these motifs: Yoginis are often shown as theriocephalic figures or with animals. Against this background, using hermeneutics of reconstruction and speculation, this presentation will wonder at some of the likely dimensions of the relationship between animal and Yogini (aspecting/manifesting the Goddess in her totality, as per tantric understandings). Could these dimensions orient us to an implicate order that holds a structure of presence which is both in an animistic relationship to an intersubjective other, and, at the same time, dissolves its outside-inside, inside-outside, becoming oneness? Might such a relational non-dual orientation help us create more vibrant interplanetary futures?​

​Read More​

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Arts-based Practices: Research and Transformation in the Academy
"Arts-based Practices: Research and Transformation in the Academy," Transformative Power of Art Journal Vol. 1 Issue 2, 2023

​As we move away from a materialist, objectivist, Cartesian-Kantian worldview to one based on the psycho-physical reality of psyche (human and nonhuman, collective and cosmic), the academic world must engage with the different ways in which we create and integrate knowledge and, indeed, must reconceptualize what it is to know. In this paper, I explore how art can be practiced as research, and its epistemic potential: what can art inquire into and what kind of knowledge might its practice and creation bring to the practitioner? I examine arts-based practices vis-à-vis participatory theories and argue that arts-based inquiries are utile in excess of representational or dualistic/disenchanted political and intellectual utilitarianism, and that they offer methodological resources for scholars to resacralize and transform our relationship to ourselves and the world.
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Read More 

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Vision and Knowledge
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"Vision and Knowledge," periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, March 2021

Perhaps it is because we live in a time of so many unknowns that now, more than ever, gives a call for our opus to become an adventure that flings open portals for vision and knowledge. In this open place, remembering and imagination draw back from harsh borders where each abruptly ‘ends’ and the other ‘begins.’ The present knows itself to be shaped by pasts and futures even as it emerges with them. Pasts and futures have knowledge for those inhabiting the present even as denizens of the present are responsible to them.​ . . .

​Read More

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​The Borderlands Feminine: A Feminist, Decolonial Framework for Re-membering Motherlines in South Asia/Transnational Culture
"​The Borderlands Feminine: A Feminist, Decolonial Framework for Re-membering Motherlines in South Asia/Transnational Culture," Integral Review: A Transdisciplinary and Transcultural Journal For New Thought, Research, and Praxis Vol. 13 No. 1, Jul 2017

This paper uses Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands framework to resignify and recover the marginalized, forgotten sacred feminine and, thereby, South Asian motherlines. The borderlands is conceived of as a new consciousness, an alternative to that which is written in history. It offers a radical synthesis of spiritual healing with anti-oppression work. Creating self-affirming, complex images of female identity, and making revisionist myths—while engaging the self in relation to culture—constitutes a decolonial practice. It enables South Asian women—as the Others of colonial modernity and brahmanical patriarchy—to renew their relation to an episteme of the sacred that liberates their voices, vitality, and authority. The post-secular sacred locates as essential a critical interrogation of all forms of oppression. The researcher enacts her decolonial recovery at the edges of her South Asian/brown postcolonial feminist subjectivity. The borderlands framework makes possible a profoundly relational, integrative onto-epistemological praxis that forefronts the grandmothers, the foremothers, and the experiences of women of color on their own terms.

​Read More

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Love as the Force of the Revolution: The Occupy Movement and Beyond
"Love as the Force of the Revolution: The Occupy Movement and Beyond"
Reality Sandwich, May 2012, and in Occupy Consciousness: Essays on the Global Insurrection, eds. Daniel Pinchbeck and Mitch Mignano (Evolver Social Movement, 2012) 

This essay views the Occupy Movement as emblematic of a collective struggle wherein a paradigm based on fear is giving way to a paradigm based on love, and which has been making itself conscious in both the collective and individual psychic processes. It brings in Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance to help us understand the transformations in the collective field, and brings to attention some ways in which love became a driving force within the Occupy movement, and the possibilities it opens up for radical critique.​

Read on Reality Sandwich | Read in the Occupy Consciousness e-book anthology

Double Vision: Revisiting the Container of the East-West Encounter
"Double Vision: Revisiting the Container of the East West Encounter," The Journal of East-West Psychology Israel, Issue 1, March 2012

 

Poems in Anthologies

"Glass House—Anthropocene" in Greening the Earth: A Global Anthology of Poetry (Penguin Random House India, 2023)
"stayed home with language" in Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing (Red Hen Press, 2022)
Nine poems in The Penguin Book of Indian Poets (Penguin, 2022)
"Sarasvati" in An Exaltation of Goddesses: Poems for the Divine Feminine (Poetry Witch Press, 2021)
"Home As We Knew It Is Gone" in Witness: The Red River Book of Poetry of Dissent (Red River, 2021)
"Ocean Song" in Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2020-21 (Hawakal, 2021)
"Promise," "Repair" in Hibiscus: poems that heal and empower (Hawakal, 2020)
Excerpts for Kala Pani in The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing (Lake Forest College Press, 2013)
​"At Lansdowne," "How We Turn Vulnerable," "The Daughter Said," "Calculating-" in Poetry with Prakriti Anthology 2007-2008 (Prakriti Foundation, 2010)

 

Collaborations

"Homing Instinct," poetry installation, Rites of Passage: 20/20 Vision, Whitney Center for the Arts, Pittsfield, MA, August 2021
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"Sarasvati," Poetry Ritual Theatre: An Exaltation of Goddesses (featured at the 2021 Symposium of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology), Summer 2021

"The Mueller Report as Poetic Text," a collective video project, 1913 Press, September 2019

"Myth of Spirits," 8x8 Collaborative Broadside with Lisa Bigalke, BONK! Broadside Project, August 2012

 

Reviews


Tamiko Beyer's bough breaks (book review), Lantern Review Blog, August 2011

Barbara Jane Reyes's Diwata (book review), Lantern Review Blog, December 2010

S S Prasad's 100 Poems (book review), Lantern Review Blog, October 2010

Deepa Mehta's Water (film review), DesiLit Magazine, Winter 2006/2007

 

Guest Blog Essays

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Transfiguration in the Aftermath of Fire: Monica Mody on Identity, Community, and LR
Lantern Review Blog, Dec 2022
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When Lantern Review invited me to join their team as a staff critic in 2010, there was so much I was yet to comprehend about the histories and the struggles of Asian America. I had only been in the United States for two years then, spent in the relatively sheltered environment of Notre Dame’s MFA program. . . . 
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Read More

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Visionary Poetics
Action Books Blog, Oct 2020 

Before I talk about visionary poetics, let me begin “elsewhere”—in which I find myself curious if non-Western and non-modern conceptualizations of the role of the poet/artist have anything to say to the poets/artists among us as we face the world today. With all that has beset us recently, it appears that our world is collapsing. Collectively, we are experiencing confusion, anxiety, grief, uncertainty, shock, and waves of uncategorizable emotions. What is clear is that the linearities and meanings that had held the world together have been collapsing one after the other. In such a scenario, the gesturing towards non-Western and non-modern frameworks and formulations is not a superficial romanticizing or fetishizing one. It embodies a desire sparked by the recognition that the links that make up “now” are broken: to call back what has been split off. . . .
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Read More​

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Process Profile: Monica Mody on "Nani's Letter"
Lantern Review Blog, May 2020

“Nani’s Letter” was published in Kajal Magazine earlier this year. It appears, as well, in my 2019 PhD dissertation, “Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-Secular South Asian Borderlands: A Critical Hermeneutics and Autohistoria/teoría for Decolonial Feminist Consciousness.” I maintain that cross-genre and multi-genre writing makes space for the insurgent epistemologies of the borderlands—in this, I am joined by Gloria Anzaldúa, whose theory of the borderlands continues to animate new decolonized pathways. . . .

​Read More

Rob McLennan's Poetry Spotlight Series on Medium
Zoe Tuck's Reading Blog
Lantern Review Blog
Montevidayo
NPM Daily

 

Poems in Literary Journals

Five poems in Weavers Literary Review, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2025

"Forest-Restored," "Urban Walk" in periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, April 2024

"Homing Instinct" in the other side of hope, volume 2, issue 2, winter 2022

"Mouthfuls," "Spirit of Regeneration," "Alchemy," "In Situ" in Touch the Donkey Issue 34, 2022

"Illegal" on Chaudiere Books Blog, April 2022

"Connection Poem" on Dusie: The Tuesday Poem, December 2021 

"sometimes skin" in The Fabulist, August 2021

"Of What Are We Made," "Relative," "Friendship," "So, where will we begin today?," "Wild—," "Our Story," "nightwatchers," "Light rises like a torched moth," "We Lived as Rhythm," "Somatic" in Rigorous, Volume Four, Issue 4, 2020  

“Timekeeper,” “Mirʁoʁ,” “I thought memory would be easy” in G U E S T #11, June 2020

"{deep ear to ground," "How We Emerge" in Almost Island, Monsoon 2020

"Nani's Letter" in Kajal Magazine, Feb 2020

"stayed home with language" on Burning House Press, Oct 2019

"Serpent Speaking," "Cunning Woman," "Ocean Song," "Prophecy: You Are Allowing Yourself to be Seen As Lit Up" in The Indian Quarterly, Oct-Dec 2019

"Nervous System" in Yes Poetry, Jun 2019

"The Witch on My Grandmother's Mountain" in Wyrd & Wyse Issue 4, 2018 

"She" in Immanence Vol. 3 No. 1, Fall/Winter 2018
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"Breath Hovers," "Flowers" in Mission at Tenth, Volume 6, Spring 2016

"Butterfly living in gentle clip" in Poetry International, Issue 20/21, 2015

"Resonance," "our faces collective as rage, snake," "Shadown" in Kitaab, Jun 2015

"on sensing and honoring the waters" in vitriol, No. 1, Jun-Oct 2014

"Red," "Myth of Knowing," "Myth of Light" (reprinted) in VAYAVYA, Spring 2014

"And sometimes," "Moon, this poem is for you," "Sita's Initiation" in MiPoesias, Feb 2014

"you'll think I's a slut" in Abraham Lincoln, Issue 8, Winter 2014

"The only true activity," "//this open to love//" Excerpt from The Love Book, "Food, A Madrigal," "Myth of Light," and a title in six parts:
1. Get off at the bus stop & it’s a short walk to the princess’s ivory tower. 
2. The weather will change according to the things you find in the magic garden. 
3. Memory will follow you on kitten feet in neat rows. 
4. You will hang from her breast, a dusty icicle. 
in Dusie, Issue 15, Jan 2014

"That I exist only as a speck on your bloodshot eyes but I am willing to sweat" in Everyday Genius, Jan 2014

"DOMAIN INTIMACY" in Compost, Issue Two, 2013 

Excerpts from Kala Pani and from The Love Book in 1913 a journal of forms, Issue 6, Oct 2013

"information blackout," "where only love" in Eleven Eleven, Issue 15, Sep 2013

"Red Rides Up Your Arm," "If this were home / Speak, she said," " To a Love Story (in Retrospect)" in Four Quarters Magazine, Aug 2013

"What we want to say is" in PIX: A Photography Quarterly, Aug 2013

Excerpt from Kala Pani in The Volta, July 2013

"The Rehabilitation of India Act of India" in Paragraphiti, June 2013

"this that takes shape" in The Bend, May 2013

"Not a Swan but a White Semi-Aquatic" in iARTistas #5, April 2013

"Myth of Loneliness," "Myth of the Wound," "Myth of the Muses" in Northeast Review, March/April 2013

"Not in my Name," "Rescue," "Shade a river blue," "I, or I" in The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (HarperCollins India, 2012)

"Happiest in the 8-by-10" in Postcolonial Text, Vol. 7 No. 4, 2012

"Myth of Cosmos" in The The Poetry, November 2012 (audio)

"Tree, Woman" in Ginosko Literary Journal, Issue 12, 2012

"Myth of Soul" in Pyrta, Spring Issue #7, March 2012

"The Ride," "costumepolitanism, or how to live between worlds" in Upstairs at Duroc, Issue 13, 2012

"Myth of Spirits" in Lantern Review, Issue 4, Winter 2012

"Double Down" (collaboration with Jen Stockdale) in Horse Less Review #10, January 2012

Excerpt from The Love Book in RealPoetik, September 2011

"Tethered,"  "by our own standards / that are old standards" "On Stones" in Pyrta, Fall Issue #5, September 2011

"bootschrift" in Nether Print #3 & Fortnight #9, 2011

Excerpts from Kala Pani in Boston Review, January/February 2011

"it laps sensory (a crime)," "The Despair of the Peoples' Resistance" in West Wind Review, 2011

"scrambled matter" in The Bend, 2011

"At Lansdowne," "How We Turn Vulnerable," "The Daughter Said," "Calculating-" in Poetry with Prakriti Anthology 2007-2008 (Prakriti Foundation, 2010)

"Ensemble of the Most Sacred," "siege," "starts with a zero," "Affairs of the heart," "Self Defence" in Compost, 2010

"portable states" in Danse Macabre #41, November 2010

"Monica" in Horse Less Review #8, October 2010

"The Menace of the Inversely Touted Universal Deprivation" in apocryphaltext Vol. 4, September 2010

Excerpt from Kala Pani in LIES/ISLE 03, April 2010

"The Loose and the Sturdy are Dreaming" in Wasafiri Issue 61, March 2010

"An Tea" (Erasures of Jean Cocteau's film writings) in Cannot Exist Issue 6, March 2010

"How We Turn Vulnerable," "At Lansdowne," "The Daughter Said," " Diptych" in Pratilipi, July 2009

"Calculating--" in Chay Magazine, March 2009

"Affection for Normal Taboos" in Women. Period. (Spinsters Ink, 2008)

"Satan" in Midway Journal Vol. 2 Issue 6, September 2008

"Ghazal 607" in nthposition, March 2008

"How Is This For Stillness" in Kritya, January 2008

"A Letter for Shamail and Shahzina," "A Letter to Dom Moraes" in Naropa's SWP Magazine, Summer 2007

"The Mark" in The Little Magazine Vol VII Issue 1 & 2, July 2007

"Capacity" in DesiLit Magazine, Summer 2006

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© 2026 Monica Mody All Rights Reserved
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    • Psyche and Nature Syllabus (Sections)
    • Women's Sacred Mysteries, Arts, & Healing Syllabus
    • ​​Women’s Visionary Poetry and Fiction Syllabus
    • Writing Spiritual Memoir Syllabus
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