In her new collection of poems, The Soundtrack of My Life – Side B , Srividya Sivakumar is fearless in her expression of desire and the sexual experience. This is Sivakumar’s third collection of poems, after The Blue Note , and The Heart is an Attic. With this work she pushes against traditional norms that define women in roles of chastity, duty or devotion, invoking a feminism that is essentially personal, allowing for a mix of many elements: desire and fulfilment; intimacy and tenderness; nostalgia and loss; betrayal and assertion; desire and dream; love’s reversal and grief.

Sivakumar’s articulation is both personal and shared, and because she shares it consciously through poetry, the reader absorbs the sharing slowly and unhurriedly, allowing it to leach below the discomfort of

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