Akhil Katyal is a worthy successor to Agha Shahid Ali, the dedicatee of How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross, which addresses the continuing tragedy of the conflict in Kashmir with a formal dexterity, imaginative reach, and compassion that the late poet would have cherished. The intimate relationship between politics and literature, which Shahid rigorously explored in The Country Without a Post Office, is the true question posed on page after page of How Many Countries Does the Indus Cross. The answers will astonish readers.”

                                                                        — CHRISTOPHER MERRILL, poet
 

“Using frank eroticism, surreptitious rhymes, and a molecular understanding of how history seeps into our lives, Akhil Katyal seamlessly entwines the political and the poetical. In poems addressed to dead friends and lost lovers, to vanished poets and remembered cities, he reminds us that poetry’s subjects and pleasures are everywhere.”

                                                                        — JEET THAYIL, poet and novelist

 
“Violent histories are being made every day, if not every moment, in contemporary India. Akhil Katyal is one of the finest new generation poets who makes lasting poetic documents out of these histories. The poems in this book deal remarkably with our external realities—a news report, an unnoticed tragedy, a loss—and interiorizes them with a fine acumen, an eye for structure and varied dictions. It’s a marvel to see how brilliantly he uses personal memories to express the ironies of our troubled times. Through his poems, one feels reassured about poetry as an act of resistance.”

                                                                        — MANGALESH DABRAL, poet