There is a gentleness in how award-winning author Rahul Mehta’s words hit me, be it in their short stories, novels, and now, their poetry. It’s that which is endearing, kind, and above all, compassionate. In March, Mehta published their debut poetry collection, Feeding the Ghosts (University Press of Kentucky, 2024). Mehta continues to take the reader into the world of a quietly assured gay man, with Robert, their partner; Kimona, their dog; their students, and their life—all through seemingly ordinary or daily practices. The meditative quality of their perspective, whether we observe a squirrel or a flower drooping, speaks of the magic they have incorporated in daily life observations.
In Mehta’s author note, they write of being on a personal quest to “find the beauty” in daily events: through the 2016 elections, the COVID pandemic, and the immediate present. It is the gentle reminder we need, when wars, famine, climate change, political strife—as well as the never-ending arguments about vaccines, diseases and the next plague—continue to haunt us and the people we love. In a year when the national elections in the U.S. may change the next few generations in how they engage with the world, this soft reminder of hope, resilience, gratitude and joy is what we need right now.
Mehta’s prose is precise with melancholy. They merge humor with wistfulness in questions of belonging and acceptance, as evident in their Lambda Literary and Asian American Literary award-winning debut story collection Quarantine (Harper Perennial, 2011) and their debut novel No Other World (Harper Perennial, 2018).
I spoke with Mehta via email and text exchanges, where we discussed their debut poetry collection, what they look forward to, which poem finally helped them identify the periodic depression they have experienced throughout their life, and how they navigate their life now, even when it feels unpredictable.
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The Rumpus: How did Feeding the Ghosts come about as a poetry collection? Were you planning to create this collection, or was it organic?
Rahul Mehta: Totally organic. I didn’t plan to write a poetry collection. This is the book I didn’t know I was writing until it was written. I explain this a little in the author’s note at the beginning of the book. Most of these pieces arose from a daily practice of trying to see, feel, and perceive beauty in the world during a difficult time. They were scribbled in my notebooks. Literally scribbled. At some point, I started posting some on a very small, private Instagram account of mine, which, at the time, had just a few dozen followers, all people I knew in real life. I’ve always been a little skittish about social media, and I’ve never had much presence there. But I have to say, this virtual community ended up being so important to me. The responses I got to my poems encouraged me to continue to write and to post them. I honestly don’t know if I would have had the courage to put the poems together in a manuscript were it not for that dear Instagram community, which felt so safe and supportive.
Rumpus: You’ve given us Quarantine, a short story collection; No Other World, a novel; and now Feeding the Ghosts. Do you feel you slide more easily into one form of writing than another?
Mehta: I do think that different ideas and stories require different forms. What I love about poetry is that it allows images—or sometimes just a single image—to become central, the thing on which everything else turns. I love poetry’s invitation to spend time in a small moment. Poetry teaches me that every moment is important and has meaning and value. Heather McHugh quotes Allen Grossman as saying, “A poem’s ‘about’ something the way a cat’s about a house.” I love that quote. Poetry frees me from concerns around “aboutness.” Even so, I would say that most of my poems in this collection are clearly aboutsomething or another. I am a storyteller at heart.
Rumpus: “Morning Prayer” appears in more than one place in this collection. In one place, it’s a musing about what scavenged incandescence has been squirreled. In another place, a fascinating musing about a drooping sunflower’s heavy head and the roar of lions in India. I find your connections, the soft but deliberate way you pull the reader in, so compelling.
Mehta: When I start a poem, I don’t know where it’s going. I’m drawn to an image or a bit of language. The process of writing, of turning that image over and over and looking at it from different angles, produces connections that often surprise me. For me, that is the great pleasure in writing. I can make connections across different times in my life, connections between different selves, and somehow that makes everything feel more whole.
Rumpus: Another “Morning Prayer” paints a lovely scene of your beautiful pup, Kimona. It is a pretty hefty prose poem. How do you determine the beat and cadence of the prose poem?
Mehta: My book officially released just a couple of weeks after my partner, Robert, and I had to say goodbye to our beloved dog, who had been our companion for ten-and-a-half years. Readers have pointed out how often Kimona appears in poems. The one you’ve cited is just one of many. She was such a deep and integral part of our lives and of my project in trying to find beauty in the world. For a while, it was my mantra that there was nothing in my life that a walk in the woods with my dog couldn’t fix.
The poem you mention is one of the heavier ones. I think writing it was part of what helped me finally start to name the on-and-off depression I have experienced throughout my life. And not just name it but also reconcile with it, understand that there might be things I can do to manage the depression, but that—at least this is true for me, I don’t want to speak for anyone else’s experience—the depression wasn’t an enemy. In fact, if managed correctly it could be a friend and teacher.
Rumpus: One of the first poems, “Pen,” is about your father, your family, and your sense of self. It is an immigrant child’s story with two countries, sensibilities, and struggles of gender and belonging, informing your concept of home. “My father, an engineer, always has a ballpoint pen . . .” is the first line. It made me weep for what I have, myself, lost as an immigrant. How did this poem come about?
Mehta: “Pen” came about in a very banal way. I really was just musing on how I never write with ballpoint pens but that my father always does. I didn’t know that the poem was going to end up being about immigration and possibilities and loss in the way that it did.
Rumpus: “Tunnels,” one of my favorite pieces in this collection, is a spectacularly braided piece. The action is compelling, and has themes of privilege, shame, disdain and fear. How are tunnels handled by the players in this piece?
Mehta: Your praise means a lot to me since this is basically a braided essay and you are such a master at that form. In the piece, tunnels become a metaphor for what we see and what we don’t, what we turn away from, what we shield our eyes from. It’s about the way we so often travel through the world, as if we are alone in our own little train car without awareness of how we are all connected. Again, I had no idea that this is what I was writing about when I started that piece. I really was just interested in this conversation that was happening on the train that I was eavesdropping on, a conversation that was activating me and stirring up all these emotions, and I wasn’t quite sure why until I wrote about it.
Rumpus: How did you divide the sections into the way you did? Is this what it was when you started and if not, what changed?
Mehta: I worked mostly from intuition when it came to grouping the poems. Having said that, I did pay a lot of attention to how pieces might resonate with one another, in terms of themes, images, or subject matter. Perhaps it’s ironic that I spent so much time deciding on the sequence given that I, myself, rarely read poetry collections front to back in the order in which the poems are presented. There are also nine sections total, which wasn’t exactly planned, but when I realized it, I was happy. At the beginning of the book, I invoke the Nine of Wands tarot card as a guide, and so nine sections feels just right.
Rumpus: This collection—as opposed to your other work, where sexuality, exploring expectations immigrant families have of their gay child—accepts gender fluidity and celebrates gay relationships. Is this more of a settling into your being? More a conscious choice to show this is the way you are now living your life?
Mehta: About six years ago, I started integrating they/them pronouns into how I introduced myself. I had just read Vivek Shraya’s book I’m Afraid of Men and was haunted by one of the lines in the book. Shraya asks herself—and I’m paraphrasing here—what she lost by denying her femininity all those years. What did it cost her? I felt that so strongly in my own life, all the ways in which I tried to squash my femininity. It is another ghost in this book. Using they/them pronouns is a way of giving myself explicit permission to lean into my femininity and reclaim what was always mine to begin with—to feed that particular ghost.
Rumpus: Dilruba Ahmed wrote a blurb for the book, in which she says, “These poems will both break you and heal you…” I couldn’t have described them any better. How did you choose which writer to ask for blurbs and how was that experience?
Mehta: I feel so lucky to have received kind words of endorsement from Dilruba Ahmed, Purvi Shah, and Kazim Ali. They are all writers whose work I admire greatly. This book also went through a peer review process at the University Press of Kentucky. My peer reviewers were Kasey Jueds, who was on a list I provided to the press, and Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, who the press chose independently. I love both writers’ work as well, and so I was grateful to have their feedback to help shape the final manuscript. Kasey helped point out what I think I already knew in the back of my head, which was that the title of the manuscript wasn’t quite right. The original title was My Tarot Told Me to Quit Twitter and Other Truths. I think it’s a catchy title, but tone-wise it was a little too flip for what the book became.
Rumpus: Who are other authors of color whose work you’re eagerly awaiting and why?
Mehta: These are already out, but Parul Kapur’s novel Inside the Mirror and Crystal Wilkinson’s Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts are high on my reading list. I’m also currently reading my press-mate Amy Alvarez’s beautiful poetry collection Makeshift Altar. I read an early draft of Sejal Shah’s amazing short story collection How to Make Your Mother Cry. I can’t stop thinking about Prachi Gupta’s memoir They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies that Raised Us. It continues to inform how I think about my experiences as the child of South Asian immigrants and especially the experiences of my female counterparts. Two other books from the past year or so that stuck with me: Tracy K. Smith’s To Free the Captives and Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance. Finally, I cannot wait for Nina Sharma’s essay collection, The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown.
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Author photograph courtesy of Rahul Mehta
