I became interested in Nikita Gill’s poetry when I read an excerpt from her poem “This is Not A Love Poem” and wanted to pick up the book that contained it; this is not that book. That book is The Girl and the Goddess, which I still have to pick up sometime. Thankfully I enjoy Gill’s poetry on the whole. I started out bitterly resenting that this was the wrong book because that meant I would have to buy another of her books; now I wouldn’t mind getting the rest of them over time. Yes, the ABAB rhyme scheme did start to slowly grow old in the first five or six poems, but on the whole they still pack one heck of a punch; in fact a couple of them set me off crying.
In this volume many of the poems cover the loss of relationships, and the need for women to start loving themselves; which is something I did not really know I have an inability to do until halfway through this book. Another popular theme is trying to get away from physically and emotionally abusive relationships, and how much people on the outside looking in don’t know what actually goes into escaping. She writes her poems like you and she are old, dear friends, and this is all advice she wants to give you over a cup of tea sitting either on your front porch, or curled up on your living room couch.
The two sections I found most interesting were the ones where she had a spate of poems based on famous goddesses and women from Greek mythology (Hera, Athena, Helen of Troy, Persephone, Aphrodite, Artemis) and where she based them on famous fairy tales (Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty). Nikita Gill brings up the point that a lot of the fairy tales we’re told growing up have the female lead almost like a prop or bystander in her own fairy tale, not someone who has any real agency over her own life.
The basic thrust of most of the book:
One of my favorite poems is “Your Heart is not a Hospital”:
Your body is not a first aid kit
for broken people
and damaged souls
and hearts that are too tired
to fix themselves.
Your heart is not a hospital
to rejuvenate
and spend all of its life blod
on other people’s problems and sadnesses.
You have been created
from the blood
of incalculable planets
and immense supernovas
and infinite constellations.
And they didn’t spend years
painting your soul
into masterpiece-like existence
for you to waste it on someone
who doesn’t appreciate you.
I really think on the whole this book is worth reading, especially of you like poetry that will make you cry as well as make you think.