Spring 2026 Cover Reveal: Fifty Mothers by Preeti Vangani

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Waiting for Mummy’s funeral picture to process, 

Papa said, Towards the end all she said

was “God.” I was God, soup was God. If you

were there, you would also be God

and I wondered if in her language-

thinning head she saw us as creatures of stone

she had bowed her head in front of

or mythical beasts with wings and wish fulfilling

fables and then, there she was, out of the dark

room, developed on glossy paper.

These bittersweet poems elegizing the poet’s mother, gone far too young, are sharp-witted yet accessible, heart-rending, wry, and irreverent. They reveal how our deepest griefs are still tied to “flaming hot, binding, disappearing” sparks of hope, the heart itself moving in directions that constantly surprise. Here, a young woman’s hymen is like “the slit in the pyre // through which [her] mother was set to flames,” the penetration of grief like the first act of making love.  But grief is multifaceted, too, fragmentary and slippery as memory.  Preeti Vangani’s collection gathers together all the possible memories and dreams a child can have of a mother, and in doing so, creates a kaleidoscopic document of love and loss, change and creative transition. 

Preeti Vangani’s Fifty Mothers unravels and rebraids the elegy with startling tenderness and lyrical rawness: “I rummage through the squalor of grief.” These poems are layered with invocation as each object, each relationship is placed on the altar of the poetic line. Fifty Mothers asks what it means to mother and to daughter, as a verb dedicated to proximity, to getting closer and closer still. Vangani’s imagery is lush and bodily, simultaneously precise and bewildering: “I have held the pink apples rolling off my mother’s cheeks.” I am in awe of Fifty Mothers and its ever-expanding portals of grief, of love, of sensory memory.   

Preeti Vangani’s beautiful and poignant Fifty Mothers is an elegy for a mother, but also what happens before and after a mother’s passing, especially how the speaker grows away, yet closer to the mother figure. Despite the elegiac subject matter, these poems are animated and spunky. “I have a mother who...poured curses hot as melting iron into my original mother’s ears for oversalting the potatoes. At the funeral, (she) rocked like a possessed monk reading the Bhagwad Gita over my mother’s still-warm corpse. Kill me for wanting to bleach her mouth." The speaker’s perspective is vibrant so that whatever we see through the speaker’s eyes is full of color and life.

Preeti Vangani’s poems are a thick braid of grief and joy, deftly weaving fifty mothers, a gone mother, a father yawning like an animal—all of that an insistent reminder that we never carry just one sorrow, never just one joy. This collection teaches us wild and unruly lessons about how love doesn’t quit, even when the body does.