From Shakespeare’s sonnets to contemporary love songs, we have always used poetry to express the desires and sorrows of our hearts. Just like these works, Kalpesh Desai’s Jasmines in Her Hair harnesses the evocative power of poetry, expressing his own emotions and experiences of love and loss.
For Desai, love is an all-consuming nature, which he embodies through the intensity and depth of his poetry. The Prelude narrates a passionate and sensual relationship, its poems utilizing prolific kinesthetic imagery that captures love’s overwhelming sensations. “Love Language” brings the love interest’s attributes to life, conveying just how entranced the speaker is with her elegance. Similarly, “There’s Something About You” and “When You Wake Up” reflect the speaker’s ardent infatuation for their love interest, incorporating intense verbs such as “sink into your eyes” and “engulfed in these feelings.”
On the other hand, Desai also questions love’s gravity. “Is it Too Soon?” and “Breakfast” examine the authenticity and depth of romantic relationships, mirroring the doubt that many of us would have in our early stages. When the speaker asks, “We wonder how something so right / could feel so wrong?” we empathize with the vulnerability that clouds us during our relationships, conveying how love is just as perplexing and enigmatic as it is passionate.
Jasmines in Her Hair also captures the feeling of loss, as all-consuming as the love preceding it. The section Yesterday’s Embers chronicles the speaker’s heartbreak after their relationship, wherein poems such as “Just Because” and “I Didn’t Love You” express profound remorse and regret. The speaker’s repetition of phrases like “just because doesn’t mean” and “I didn’t, at least not in the way” is a bitter affirmation of their neglected feelings, identifying with the guilt and insecurity that plague us during heartbreak.
Yet these poems tackle the bitterness of losing someone and the longing and nostalgia. As depicted in “Broken Promises” and “The Tune in My Head,” the speaker’s fond memories of their lover intensify their heartbreak, resonating with the haunting pain that we experience. Amidst agonizing feelings, Desai addresses why we use poetry to verbalize loss, not just love. In “I Don’t Miss You,” he writes, “I don’t miss you, but then again, I lie / with these words, your absence I justify.” This sheds light on how writing poetry allows us to acknowledge and process our emotions, which then helps us validate our worth.
Ultimately, poetry immortalizes our love. The words we write will forever be etched as testaments of our feelings for the people we love, as the speaker has expressed in “Written in Metaphors, Released in Rhymes.” But Jasmines in Her Hair also chooses to remember the love interest beyond heartbreak and instead with hope, too. “Devoid of Blame,” says, “You can choose to let go and forgive,” which signifies the growth and resilience we develop over time when we healthily move on. Poems, therefore, have a transformative impact that frees us from the emotions binding us. As we spill our hearts onto words, we gain newfound understanding from our verbalized emotions, and with that, we always choose to write of them – both in heartbreak and love.
By Emery Sy