An impressive debut collection Precedence is a heartbreaking poetic narrative about surviving child abuse but also about surviving the Canadian court system Pujita Verma writes openly and precisely without apology weaving court documents such as BillC27 the Criminal Code and convictions redacted and rewritten with her poetic lines and her truth Verma is a humble talented writer meticulous in her craft whose poetry is eloquently fierce and rich in courage With this collection she heralds in a new wave of South Asian Canadian women poetsSharanpal Ruprai author of Pressure Cooker Love Bomb

The poems in Pujita Vermas Precedence are cleaved by violence resplendent with ribshattering power pain and beauty Tracing the complexity and hypocrisies of culture family and justice Vermas work sings even at its darkest turns Her language is chiffon letting light slip through Theres no doubt Pujita Verma is an undeniable new voice in poetryHollay Ghadery awardwinning author of Fuse Rebellion Box and Widow Fantasies

The quiet strength of these poems emerges from a rich interiority forged in the unspeakable the softness for what must be spoken and the poets refusal to surrender her narrative to the laws echo chambers From an ache that reigns deep in the body Pujita Verma reimagines in gleaming language a legacy of women who could not leaveSoraya Peerbaye author of Tell poems for a girlhood

Pujita Vermas debut collection is a lyrical testimony and testament to the power of language in naming and reclaiming ones self from unspeakable violence The speaker of these poems traverses the silence of memory of shame of fear and the fracture and splitting of the law borders night time glass and screens Verma bridges the gaps between the unsayable calling upon a lineage burdened with drowning women of whom she has tasted their soot and struggle We were birthed from universal womb It is this birthing and rebirthing of the power of the maternal not just the speakers own mother but her grandmother her aunties the water the ways in which she the speaker must mother herself in light of her survival and deliver herself anew Centrally it is through the reclamation of a language not passed to her which allows her to amidst this drowning swim home To remake a place taken from her This book simply put is full of ruin and reincarnation and I felt both ruined and then reincarnated in its reading wholly different upon completion than when I began Pujita Verma is a poet of singular power this debut collection an indelible gift we her readers are lucky to have been givenMichael Daniel Lee author of The Only Worlds We Know