Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. To read GILT is to open windows steamed with bright and exacting language, worlds where a 'cobra is a garland--no, the cobra / is a man's knuckles, a girl's hair clumped / between them.' Shirali's tough-tender debut embroiders lavish Indian weddings and Diwali festivals with the reckonings of a relationship's end. The rich wisdom you glean from the powerful pages of GILT will leave you spent and enchanted. --Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Raena Shirali is a poet who keeps asking what poems can actually do, and these formally inventive lyrics ask for activity, for travel. Her comment on culture, on identity, on justice is her comment on poetry. It is not fixed; and if it is, it shouldn't be. GILT is a book of danger and sarcasm and heart. --Jericho Brown