“When my father loosened his hold
on the worn scaffolding of this world
and his ashes, soft as tilled dusk,
were pressed together
into the cradle of my family’s hands…”

Some poetry collections try to impress you with language. Between Breath and Memory does something quieter and, in many ways, more powerful. It builds its emotional weight slowly through memory—family stories, inherited histories, childhood fragments, and the lingering presence of those who shaped the speaker’s life.

The opening poem immediately sets the tone. It begins with the death of the father, but what unfolds is less about death itself and more about the strange persistence of connection. The speaker watches as her family carries his ashes back to the farmland where he once lived, planting a guava tree above him—an image that becomes one of the collection’s most haunting symbols of continuity and renewal.

Later, when the world finally opens again after the pandemic, she returns to that place and finds the tree already flowering:

“and when the world finally unlatched
its borders
after the long quarantine
of breath and fear,
I went back,
and by then the guava—
green-hearted, tireless—
was already freckled with flowers,
pale as whispered benedictions,
and I gathered a few petals
cool and frail
as the last syllables
of a remembered blessing.”

That moment captures what the book does best: it turns personal grief into something gentle and almost sacred. Loss is never treated dramatically; instead it is woven into ordinary objects, gestures, and landscapes.

Many poems revolve around family memory—stories about grandparents, childhood homes, and the quiet resilience of earlier generations. One particularly striking poem recalls a grandmother who survived a childhood where girls were rarely allowed to live, and how a father once carried two frightened children away from danger on horseback. The poet reflects on that moment with a sudden realization: that her own life exists only because someone once chose compassion over despair.

Throughout the collection, everyday objects become vessels of history. A wooden chest brought with a bride to her new home. Handwoven blankets that travel across generations and continents. A sofa carefully chosen by a father for his daughter’s dowry and preserved decades later because it still carries the memory of his hand.

Even the smallest childhood scenes are rendered with warmth. In one poem, siblings sit drawing imaginary worlds together in the quiet heat of afternoon:

“jungle beasts skulking in waxy greens,
parrots loud as festival drums, rivers
coiled in impossible blues…
and as we drew,
leaning shoulder to shoulder
in that careless hush of childhood,
I wondered what unseen hand
had carved so much quiet into the day.”

These moments accumulate until the reader begins to feel the deeper structure of the book: a meditation on inheritance. Not just land or objects, but habits of care, storytelling, resilience, and love.

The poems about the father are especially moving. They portray him not as a mythic figure but as someone whose kindness was expressed through simple acts—helping neighbors, teaching patiently, or quietly taking responsibility for the people around him. In one reflection, the poet realizes that this kind of everyday generosity takes a kind of courage that rarely receives applause.

By the end of the collection, grief begins to soften into something calmer. The speaker dreams of the father not as someone lost, but as someone who has simply moved into another realm of memory and imagination:

“Know that my tears have gentled—
for so many nights they sat with me
at the edge of the dark…
and when you come, it is without weight,
as if you have forgiven my living,
and I have forgiven your leaving.”

What makes Between Breath and Memory memorable is its quiet sincerity. These poems are not trying to dazzle or shock. Instead they work like family stories told slowly over time, each one adding another thread to the fabric of remembrance.

By the final pages, the reader has traveled through farms in Punjab, childhood streets in India, and winter evenings in Canada—all connected by the fragile but enduring ties of family.

It’s a collection that reminds us how memory works: not in grand moments, but in the small scenes we carry long after they’ve passed.

Between Breath and Memory is the kind of poetry collection that feels very grounded in memory. Many of the poems revolve around family, migration, childhood, and the quiet ways love continues to shape us even after people are gone.

What I liked most is how the book focuses on ordinary moments—stories told by parents, objects kept for decades, childhood afternoons that seemed small at the time but later become meaningful. The poems often move gently between the past and the present, showing how those memories still live inside the speaker.

One of the lines that really stayed with me comes from a poem reflecting on inherited kindness:

“sometimes kindness
leaves behind a shape
others can still step into.”

I liked how many of the poems show family history through stories passed down across generations. In one poem the speaker remembers sitting with her father as he told stories about his childhood far away:

“we children
would gather at my father’s knees,
coaxing him
to loosen one more tale
from the hush
of his faraway youth.”

There are also poems that reflect on how fragile life can be and how easily things might have turned out differently. One moment that stood out to me describes how the speaker’s life exists because of a single choice made long ago:

“how a single turn of her hand
could have erased
the long thread that leads to me.”

Some of my favourite moments in the collection were the quieter childhood scenes. They capture small details really well, like afternoons spent drawing imaginary landscapes together:

“jungle beasts skulking in waxy greens,
parrots loud as festival drums, rivers
coiled in impossible blues.”

Even when the poems deal with grief, they often carry a sense of gratitude for the life that came before. By the end of the book the tone feels calmer, almost reflective, as the speaker remembers a loved one appearing gently in dreams.

Overall this is a thoughtful and heartfelt collection. It’s less about dramatic moments and more about the small memories that quietly shape who we become. The poems feel personal but also very relatable if you’ve ever thought about family history, loss, or the way memories linger.

This book was quietly nourishing for my soul. Several of the poems stayed with me long after I finished reading, simple on the surface (“some loves begin crooked/ and grow truer with time.”- “Crooked Beginnings”) but filled with warmth, memory, and love for books and storytelling. Among my favorites were “Inheritance of Pages,” “Rebellion by Reading,” and “Bookfolks,” all of which I found myself rereading more than once. They capture something deeply familiar—the way a love of reading passes through families almost like an inheritance. Some others that I loved are "Roots”, “Harvest Play,” “The Arithmetic of Care”.

What I enjoyed most is how Between Breath and Memory often finds wisdom in everyday life—kitchens, childhood homes, quiet family moments—and turns them into something reflective and tender:

“some loves begin crooked
and grow truer with time.”
(from “Crooked Beginnings”)

These poems feel intimate and lived-in, full of small domestic moments that quietly reveal how stories, language, and reading shape a family across generations. A thoughtful, heartfelt collection that feels especially comforting for anyone who grew up in a house where books were always close at hand.

Quiet, reflective, and rooted in memory. This not my usual go to format of poetry but I enjoyed it a lot. This was a beautiful collection.