SO THAT YOU KNOW (Poetry)
(HarperCollins 2025) 

‘Often enigmatic, always exquisitely shaped, the poems in Mani Rao’s So That You Know introduce us to an ensemble of previous and future selves. Except that we can’t always tell which is which. Despite the promise of fair warning in its title, this collection does not prepare us for the everyday reality that its pensive, urbane poems transfigure into a minefield of anomaly and dissonance. So That You Know confronts us with fruit that resist etiquette, with vistas of a mutable world of hazard and tremor, eyed warily over the edge of a coffee mug. Dwelling on a mother’s cabinet of fears for her daughter, for instance, Rao writes: “No wonder I am so fearless / All the panic safe with her.” Objects, places, animals, limbs—all these show a tendency, at once alarming and delightful, to run, hide, change places and alter themselves here. At the core of this book lies a generative tension between presence and persona, essential to the lifelong project of self-fashioning, with all its attendant risks. How do we know who to be, these poems ask us. Mani Rao’s So That You Know is a wry, witty and bracing instruction manual in both defining, and defying, oneself.’
– Ranjit Hoskote

‘Mani Rao is the least metaphysical of our poets, or to put it another way, the most material. Her very myths have the quality of concrete fables. In her newest poems, she offers up a body—her own?—preparing for erasure. Naturally, ghosts are a worry: not the spooks of metaphysics, but the traces of matter bodies leave, or simply disclose in the wash of their absence. 

“Black hair emerges / on the other side // as a palette of grey, / then vanishes / in white light.” Black and white and grey recur with almost heraldic import; bled of colour, graphics hammer the message home. One image is simply a mouth created by a pair of lips impressed on the page, floating there like a mocking black hole. Rupture dogs rapture.

The detritus of marriage is viewed from a great—even galactic—distance (and worth two minutes’silence). Things are seen for what they are: A monster owl on the fence flew away. What is it the sign of? The sign of an owl. Rao is not altogether lost to abstraction, can still discover a winged heart in her chest, but she has returned to the only self she can trust—alone is the soma of song. She allows herself the pleasures of sardony in the occasional toss-off at Iowa or India, even a pun on her name, but the mood remains defiant, the temperature low: “It is Antarctica I need.” One secret she will share: “God is a shy bird.” And one piece of advice: “Be wildered.” Scrupulous, savage, fearless: here is poetry that refuses to beguile. We owe it our complete attention.’
– Irwin Allan Sealy

‘I love the gentle whip-crack of both line and image in Mani Rao’s poems. There is some precious gift in the intensity of such condensed language, that tells truth sparely and evocatively, so that a reader could rise to meet and know it. Eunice de Souza had that gift, and Kamala Das, and Shreela Ray. So does Mani Rao.’
– Kazim Ali

‘Unscared of the sacred, wearing grief wryly, So That You Know sets the epic in conversation with the intimate at the same table, knives out, sharpened inward. This incisive paean to the cardinal humanity of love and loss demonstrates why Mani Rao is a uniquely masterful voice in Indian letters and world poetry today.’
– Alvin Pang

‘Assured and playful, typographically agile and semantically spare, this is quintessential Mani Rao poetic terrain. This volume offers a glimpse of a thoughtful and dedicated poet’s journey over the years.’
– Arundhathi Subramaniam

‘‘In So That You Know, Mani Rao’s tour de force of new and selected poems, readers will find themselves in thrilling encounters with the hinge upon which all living things swing. In poems spanning nearly forty years, Rao engages a negative capability that serves as both an ethics and a warning against false promise of closure; poems that prove, in their meticulous attention, that the conditions by which you learn to live today, will not be those that are needed tomorrow: “When wings are ready / the bird has flown …” (“Conditions of Freedom”). Via self-erasure, in the remnant of rhyme and metre, via essay in its purest form of finding (“I, Lorine Niedecker”) and always via the tender luminosity of the lyric and an expansive sense of humour, Mani Rao gives us poems that suggest it is via acceptance of indeterminacy that we find … dare I say it? Freedom. “When I walked into a poem / and met a meticulous metre // Got battered by drums / that drowned the lyrics // I couldn’t tell the theme / for the scheme and // bum-rush end-rhymes / crashed my dreams // Maybe I ought to mince / my words, toe the line // But I don’t / I’m a freedom fighter (“Vers Libre”).’
– Claudia Keelan

‘Here I am, weightless /

now take me home’

So That You Know is the quintessential Mani Rao collection. These are poems that hold the playful exuberance of youth and the dazzling insight of age; that are at times measured, at times extravagant. What unites them is their commitment to mining deep into the recesses of the heart and offering moments of ecstatic revelation. ‘Every morning you would breathe me fly,’ says the poet, and one can feel the words take wing.

Mani Rao’s work has, over the years, acquired a reputation for battering against the doors of poetic convention, experimenting with form and language, and untethering images so they run fast and thick. Part visual, part text, So That You Know stands testimony to the mischief and anarchy of her poetry.

If Mani Rao’s language has been described as ‘molten lava’, here is the book that reminds you why. Each stanza-searing, incandescent, unstoppable.