"Where fear collides with the little shield of love."

Manahil Bandukwala's second collection of poems is a meditation on love during times of social and political upheaval. As a sunflower's growth reaches toward the sun, so, she suggests, is a lover's growth compelled by the gravitational pull and soul-light of their beloved. Many of these poems are in conversation with other poets and artists, creating a lineage of call and response. Against a backdrop of terrestrial crisis, come, spend your precious minutes in love's Heliotropia, where we are magnetized by the unfathomable dark matter of another person, and know ourselves as celestial bodies flowering in spacetime, together.

"Intergalactic yet deeply earthly, intertextual yet wonderfully original..."
- Mikko Harvey, author of Let the World Have You

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist originally from Pakistan and now settled in Canada. In 2021, she was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. She works as Coordinating Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, and is Digital Content Editor for Canthius. She is a member of Ottawa-based collaborative writing group VII. MONUMENT is her first book.

Manahil Bandukwala's profile page

"Manahil Bandukwala's poems are curious, heartfelt, joy-filled expeditions: through rainstorms and supernovas, alternate realities and past lives, or sometimes simply through the park on a walk with a dear friend. Intergalactic yet deeply earthly, intertextual yet wonderfully original, Heliotropia is a place 'where fear collides / with the little shield of love' — and love prevails."
- Mikko Harvey, author of Let the World Have You

"Like a daylily's petals turn to the sun, so Manahil Bandukwala's lyric angles against all odds to face the fervid beloved. Through archives of space and scripture, music and made magic, Heliotropia offers a threshold for the reader, a portal — to step over and through is to embark on a spiritual journey into love's fathomless matrices. In intertextual poems as cosmic as they are botanic and tactile, Bandukwala invites readers to surrender to intimacy. 'Love is worth loving,' we are reminded, and against all odds, alternative endings, or origins, 'the best is what we have.' Here is a collection that grounds and glorifies, every invocation at once a flame, a sun, a psalm."
- Sarah Ghazal Ali, author of Theophanies