"This is a poet who can toggle between bikinis and trilobites, between astrophysics and pop culture, between elegy and premonition. Kombiyil’s work is alive to whiplash our lives in the timeloops of the universe." 

—Maureen N. McLane, My Poets and This Blue

"These are intellectually dexterous poems, but, more vitally, poems ‘laden and alive’ with unexpected illumination." 

—Arundhathi Subramaniam, When God is a Traveller

"Ellen Kombiyil’s debut collection contains one of the most marvelous lines of poetry I’ve read in quite a while: ‘oh one one zero zero oh oh one.’ Unequivocating and precise as binary code, Kombiyil’s work hacks into the lyric itself, in poems of unsettling intelligence and emotional honesty." 

—Srikanth Reddy, Facts for Visitors

“‘Nothing happens until something moves,’ Albert Einstein once said, and Ellen Kombiyil’s first book of poems is a glorious embodiment of that principle. Innovative, ecstatic, and emotionally potent, these poems shimmer with their skill and acumen, and indeed it’s been a long time since I’ve been as excited about a new book as I am about this one.”

—Ravi Shankar, The Autobiography of a Goddess