Coconut

In her debut collection, Canadian National Slam Champion Nisha Patel commands her formidable insight and youthful, engaged voice to relay experiences of racism, sexuality, empowerment, grief, and love. These are vitally political, feminist poems for young women of colour, with bold portrayals of confession, hurt, and healing.

Coconut rises fiercely like the sun. These poems bestow light and warmth and the ability to witness the world, but they ask for more than basking; they ask readers to grow and warn that they can be burnt. Above all, Nisha Patel’s work questions and challenges propriety and what it means to be a good woman, second-generation immigrant, daughter, consumer, and lover.

AUTHOR

Nisha Patel

Nisha Patel is a queer spoken word poet & artist. She is the City of Edmonton’s 8th Poet Laureate and the 2019 Canadian Individual Slam Champion. She is a prominent organizer and community builder, having worked with festivals across Canada, participating in both the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word and the Canadian Individual Slam Championship. Her chapbooks, Limited Success, Water, Edmonton Girl, and I See You have reached audiences around the world with their discussions of family and grief, racism, and feminism. Over the years, Nisha has led many workshops and performed from small town Moose Jaw to metropolitan Seoul, South Korea over the course of four national and international tours. With nearly 200 performances to date, Nisha is committed to furthering her goals of reaching audiences that need it and the pursuit of excellence in spoken word. To that end, she has self-started community-focused residencies and mentored poets from multiple disciplines, curated showcases, taught performance and writing, and worked within new genres. In 2019, she co-founded a national queer femme South Asian artist collective, Maza Arts, and co-founded Moon Jelly House, a publishing house centering the work of marginalized poets.

Reviews

Praise for Coconut:

“Coconut is a book of conversation-starters. It prompts questions we didn’t realize we needed to ask and challenges those answers we thought we knew best. Here, readers will find a collection that is by turn tongue-in-cheek, full of rage and longing, contradictory, defiant, and bold. Patel invites us to embrace all these things, these confessions and confrontations alike, to engage with the political and the poetic, recognizing that in her hands, they are one and the same.”
~ Anuja Varghese, Hamilton Review of Books

“The table of contents of Coconut reads like a poem I wish I could write. Patel’s words collapse well-established defences into nothing but excuses. Poems entitled ‘chai latte’ and ‘father’ are both gorgeous and gut wrenching, like a sunset over a tsunami. Readers will hold their breath. The exhale will not bring relief but rather, perspective.”
~ Rebecca Thomas, author of I place you into the fire