Language of the Wound Is Love, FlowerSong Press, 2025, ISBN: 978-1-96324596-7, $18.00
In her fourth poetry collection, Language of the Wound Is Love, Megha Sood continues her courageous exploration of the self, the body, identity, and social relationships within a framework of diaspora, trauma, injustice, and transformation. Refusing to be silent, she has chronicled in her prior work and in this new collection that being a woman, being an immigrant, being a person of color, are all dangerous identities, particularly in combination. What does it mean to claim all three? They cause wounds, wounds that become a language of care and endurance. Her previous book in particular—My Body Lives Like a Threat—examined this emotional terrain, and here she further develops its exposition.
Wounds and love are entangled, as in the work of Ntozake Shange: there should be no apology from the marginalized. Instead, rage becomes lyric and traverses the page, as in “My Bones Rattle with Crimson Rage.”
“My bones rattle in a symphony
with crimson rage.
This body is mine.
This body is not an apology” (p. 34)
Her book is divided into five sections in which she examines various forms of hurt and repossession in an interwoven fashion: “Language Lost,” “Language of the Wound Is Love,” “Every Pain Has a Story,” “A Collective State of Disbelief,” and “Brotherhood.” A reader will be moved by the sense of displacement, the various forms of loss in these pages. But, despite xenophobia, the loss of primary language, the writer here prevails and turns cultural erasure into art. In “My identity as a First-Generation Immigrant,” for example, she rises above her lived experience and becomes a voice for possibility and survival, a survival carved out of loss:
“My identity carved as a first-generation immigrant in a land built
on the calloused hands that are painted with silvery dreams of kingdoms to come.” (p. 4)
In a sense this work is a witness to the experience of marginalization and a challenge to the reader to recognize sometimes-shared struggle, as much as it is an elegy to what’s lost. By referencing hands that are calloused from labor, Sood acknowledges the quiet work of those that work hard and struggle for a better life.
The first section of the book is where Megha Sood most confronts language loss and cultural disconnect, a common experience for those in the diaspora. The erosion of language here means the loss of cultural memory, of a sense of belonging. Sood writes:
“ … the one and the only question;
where does one belong,
when the only home you ever knew, deserts you?” (“Deserted,” p. 18)
There is poignancy in that question, the loss not only of language but of the home that resides within the self. The way that love and pain are intertwined is the focus of the second section, as in the title poem: “Loneliness leaning in the spaces between us / hearts knotted tightly as the wooden stump.” (p. 44) Love is the scar that holds hurt, that enables endurance, that enables people to connect with one another, despite what trauma has done to them. This is the paradox suggested by the title of the collection.
Trauma and injustice have a story to tell, suggests Sood’s middle section. “I have a small wish cupped in my soft palms which bear witness to everything.” She writes in the title poems for the section (p. 60) To hold pain in this fashion resists its erasure. This section of the book is the one most testimonial. What do we do about the socio-historical structures that have perpetuated violence? We must endure, physically and spiritually, Sood suggests, and live ethical lives in response. But we must never forget.
In “A Collective State of Disbelief,” her fourth section, Sood moves most deliberately from individual suffering to the wider world’s collective suffering, a world in which the response to this suffering has been unbelievably muted. She wants an end to that lack of moral clarity, a survival strategy that helps unify the world:
“See, I have to scream loud
for all caged minds to hear me,
Diversity is not a curse
it’s the only cure for our ailing humanity.” (“The Perfect Solution, p. 69)
The final section, “Brotherhood,” is the most optimistic. “Rise,” Sood invokes in her poem with that title:
“Rise,
rise above the opinionated heads
on stooping shoulders of demised desires
on your sturdy legs or stilts
but rise and become the voice of the unspoken
war cry of the mute
hoarse whispers of the fallen
in the crevice of night.” (p. 85-86)
There are echoes here of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” but Sood’s less optimistic in her repetition of the word “rise.” Still, this is not a collection that ends in despair of what the world has become. Through shared resistance, she suggests, healing can become a possibility.
Formally, Sood writes generally in free verse and with restraint. But she refuses to simplify pain and trauma. She has written a personal narrative that is also a statement of ethical principles for how societies should behave. Combining confession and critique, she writes not about reconciliation, necessarily, but about transformation. This, she tells us, is what it’s like to live inside contradictions caused by issues of belonging and the costs of both invisibility and visibility. This, her work insists, this naming of pain, is an act of love.
Susana H. Case is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently, Matinée Girls (Broadstone Books, 2026), and co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk & Cake Press, 2022), Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award as well as Finalist for several awards. Case is also co-editor with Margo Taft Stever and Sandra Yannone of Unsinkable: Poems Inspired by the Titanic (Salmon Poetry, 2026). She won the Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition in 2002 for The Scottish Café, which was re- released in English/Polish as Kawiarnia Szkocka (Opole University Press, 2010) and in English/Ukrainian as Шотландська Кав'ярня (Slapering Hol Press, 2024). susanahcase.com
Megha Sood is a Pushcart Nominated Award-Winning Poet, Editor, Author, and Literary Activist based in New Jersey, USA. She is an Associate Editor at MookyChick(UK), Life and Legends (USA), and Literary Partner in the project “Life in Quarantine'' with Stanford University, USA. Works featured in journals, including Poetry Society of New York, New York Public Library zine, NPR, WNYC Studio, PBS American Portrait, American Writers Review, Stanford Daily, Kissing Dynamite, Rising Phoenix Review, and many more.Blogs at https://meghasworldsite.wordpress.com/.Tweets at @meghasood16