New Horizons
By Kani Krishnan
Unrestricted Editions, 2022
Review by Clara Otto
The feeling of reaching out is a familiar one; we stretch out a hand, a fingertip—we whisper a word. In Kani Krishnan’s debut chapbook, New Horizons, Krishnan sends out waves; ripples and surges of piercing observation that burst against our senses. Connection and longing, beauty and energy swirl through this collection in an ever quickening dance—pulling the reader in along the way.
These poems, rich in imagery and texture, explore the intangible through sensory experience. Our attention is drawn to invisible elements: to atoms and the spaces in between them; to the light that filters through. In “Play of Light,” the speaker examines themselves on the atomic level, asking whether light seeps through their own spaces; “Wonder if it went in / Or filtered through / My inner core.” Sight is not the only rich sense: in “Erasure,” the mind is a scent, a strung garland: “Gone in a puff / a whiff of the mind / As fragrance dissipates.” In “Unwritten,” language becomes music, “sing song words” coming together to form “unique melodies”—elsewhere, bees, blossoms, and sweet fruits circle through the life cycle; a kind of dance in itself.
Krishnan invites us to reach out and touch the universe—with our thoughts, our bodies, our words. The poet casts the cosmos as its own character. “The universe is quite intelligent,” says the speaker in “Knowing,” and touches on a sense of play and intimacy between the speaker and the natural forces surrounding them. Krishnan sends out pulses to see what they will hit—no matter what they find, the collision is achingly beautiful. These little impacts are moments of connection: the speaker guides us as we brush against the minds of others. As the speaker says:
Every thought has a wave…
My words as a ripple…
Across the cosmos
Waiting for the
Right mind to
Tap and register
(“Nothing is Lost Forever”)
At the core of this collection is a certainty—a confidence in the face of unknowing. In “Quaking Mad Self,” Krishnan’s speaker works through “upheavals…wrung into tight knots,” imagining complicated, sometimes painful emotions unravelling into individual streams, flowing finally into one. “Sad Dance” is a declaration of the self in the midst of upheaval; the speaker moves through regret and uncertainty, questioning their own definition. These swirling unknowns, however, are met with an assertion:
When I know
I will know
Not in a year
Not in a month
Or in a second
When I know
I know in
The now
Krishnan’s energy moves through New Horizons—and through the world of these poems—like radio waves; travelling great distances in the dark, passing through scents and colours and sounds. In this compelling debut, those same waves find their way to us.
Clara Otto is a queer Canadian writer living on the ancestral and unceded lands of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples. Currently, she is an MFA student at the University of British Columbia. Her work has been published in Plenitude Magazine, Ruminate, The Puritan, and elsewhere.