SHRINES — Sagaree Jain
This book is full of SHRINES.
Fiery, devotional, and sparking with wit, these poems journey through love in all its forms. These are shrines to a mother’s tenderness, to a lover’s leaving words, to every colorful queer who has found themselves in the glowing image of another. SHRINES is half queer coming of age tale, half a mad dash to ecstasy, all pulsing with effervescent joy.
Praise for SHRINES
“We are so lucky to live in a world where this book exists. To go back to your own profane self and call it sacred, to make a ritual of it even, is a gift. Thank God for the images, lyricism, and wit offered in this book that teach the reader to make a shrine of themselves.”
—Arati Warrier, author of LONGING AND OTHER HEIRLOOMS
“Sagaree Jain’s SHRINES is a revelatory body of poetry (body in every sense of the word – erotic, joyful, haunted, grieving, yearning) that explores and transforms our idea of what language can do. Jain writes with defiant tenderness and playfulness, always reaching for the love that lines our losses. Each line is at once precise and liberated, unspooling desire and celebration across the page.”
—K–Ming Chang, author of BESTIARY
“The poems in Sagaree Jain’s stunning debut work at the limits of the human body, desire, and memory. In SHRINES, language itself becomes a vehicle for unpacking the experience of living inside a body in an impossible world and finding pleasure there. This is a book that, as its title suggests, offers a reader multiple places to pray.”
—Sam Sax, author of MADNESS
About the Author
Sagaree Jain (they/them) is a poet, writer, artist, and queer from the Silicon Valley. Their writing has been featured in Autostraddle, The Margins, them. magazine, and The Offing, where they’re also an Assistant Editor. Their collaborative poetry collection with Arati Warrier, Longing and Other Heirlooms, was published with Eggtooth Editions in April 2022. When not writing, they work as a community based researcher at the Othering and Belonging Institute. They are class and caste privileged and tweet at @sagareej.
