In a month-long act of resistance, poets remind us that poetry can push back against forces that marginalize voices, erase stories, and impose control over how we live and imagine.
An interview with Renée Sarojini Saklikar
ALL LIT UP: How would you describe Bramah’s Discovery to someone picking it up for the first time?
RENÉE SAROJINI SAKLIKAR: Epic Fantasy in Verse/Verse Novel: The hero Bramah, “brown, brave and beautiful” works as a locksmith on contract to the evil Consortium, a monolithic global economic and agricultural empire. She bands together with resisters, seed savers, workers, and craftspeople to try and survive on a planet Earth ravaged by climate change. The third book in a series, Bramah’s Discovery features magic realism, supernaturals in Paris, mythical beasts, and climate chess, and blends poetry with the novel.
High fantasy fiction often involves alternative worlds where time travel and magic happen alongside battles for good and evil. Epic poems are long narrative poems told in different poetic styles. In my series, you’ll find both genres combined within the structure of an epic, written in verse.
ALU: How do you see poetry as an act of resistance?
RENÉE: In a distracted age, filled with “easy come/easy go” AI-generated generic art and language, hand-crafted poetry from what I call, “Sarojini Intelligence” in its imagery, voice, form, and shape, dares to be different. Writing, crafting, creating poems that speak to our climate emergency in ancient epic forms such as blank verse and the sonnet and then blends those with prose poems and characters resists genre boxes and definitions. It’s exhilarating!
ALU: What does poetry allow you to say or refuse that other forms don’t?
RENÉE: Everything All At Once. Especially politics, economics, science, and gender relations. It’s always way better to tell it slant, using the imagination, with characters that warm the heart, and action sequences that challenge our senses, filled with imagery, than to pontificate in turgid dogma.
ALU: Is there a line (in your own or someone else’s work) that you return to?
RENÉE: Yes: Each page is a portal. This is a line from my book series which speaks to me very deeply: all reading and writing is a kind of magical portal to other worlds, to imagining better worlds, and to gathering strength to resist injustice.
ALU: What role does community—readers, poets, teachers—play in your writing?
RENÉE: A vital role of support, inspiration, learning. I love how readers teach me what my books mean to them and how they interpret Bramah as a locksmith demi-goddess, for example: I love how they interpret “good and evil” when they hear me read that her motto is “let all evil die and the good endure.”
ALU: How do you sustain a practice of writing poetry in politically or personally challenging times?
RENÉE: By doing something creative. Every day. By not spending hours distracted by social media. By refusing to click on little icons telling me to use AI. By reading books in hard print. By shopping at local indie bookstores. By doing yoga and walking. By voting and supporting taxpayer-funded Medicare and advocacy for community-led ways to resist accelerating climate change. By loving my S-curved, brown-skinned, silver-haired self, despite being bombarded by images that don’t look like me. By telling myself every day, after doing at least some writing: Get Up. Get Out. Make something!
Read a poem from Bramah’s Discovery
This New World Order. These despairing conditions.
These Seed Savers and Resisters, separate and apart.
Those Makers run down by violent gangs.
Those gangs breeding by rape and by pillage—
hand-to-hand combat, those villages ransacked,
farmers indentured to feed an army on the march.
Those marching Incels loyal to the Grand Vizier.
That Al-Rashid. Those Consortium Executives.
Their Bitcoin ETFs. Everyone buying out everyone else.
Everyone searching for big money, easy access, satellites and drones.
Those searchers on the lookout for the boy named Amahl.
That Amahl playing climate chess.
Those slender fingers, trembling, mercury poisoning,
piece by piece. Everyone swearing by the White Queen.
Those brigades of orphans, enemies of the Incels.
Those armed standoffs outside the city gates.
Everyone everywhere dreaming of rain
droplets to downpour, no burning, no floods;
just a good soaking from the time from Before.
Only the orphans knew to sing:
Hey Aunty Monsoon!
Come find us, we’re W-C-N-S-F
Bramah, you’ve deserted us
Hey Aunty Abisha,
We know you are for us
Everyone, everywhere, W-C-N-S-F.
Reprinted with permission from Nightwood Editions.
Watch Renée read a poem
* * *
Renée Sarojini Saklikar is the author of five books, including the award-winning children of air india and Listening to the Bees. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including Exile Editions, Chatelaine, The Capilano Review, and Pulp Literature. She was Poet Laureate for the City of Surrey (2015–2018), co-founded Lunch Poems at SFU and teaches Creative Writing at Douglas College. Bramah’s Discovery is the third volume of her epic fantasy in verse series, THOT J BAP, which includes Bramah and the Beggar Boy (2021) and Bramah’s Quest (2023). She lives in East Vancouver, BC.
* * *
Thanks to Renée for answering our questions, and to Nightwood Editions for the text from Bramah’s Discovery, which is available to purchase now (and get 15% off + FREE shipping Canada-wide with the code POETSRESIST until April 30!).
Follow our NPM series all month long to discover new poetry or connect with old favourites, and visit our poetry shop here.
