Celebrate the release of Sunu P. Chandy's Poetry Collection My Dear Comrades with Chandy, in conversation with Rajiv Mohabir

ABOUT THE BOOK 
In this poetry collection, Sunu P. Chandy includes stories about her experiences as a woman, civil rights attorney, parent, partner, daughter of South Asian immigrants, and member of the LGBTQ community. Sunu’s poems provide some resolve, some peace, some community, amidst the competing notions of how we are expected to be in the world, especially when facing a range of barriers.  Whether the experience is being disregarded as a woman of color attorney, being rejected for being queer, losing a most treasured friendship, doubting one’s romantic partner or any other form of heartbreak, Sunu’s poems highlight the human requirement of continually starting anew.

SUNU P. CHANDY is a poet, parent, and a civil rights attorney. Sunu completed her B.A. in Peace and Global Studies/Women’s Studies at Earlham College, her J.D. at Northeastern University School of Law, and her M.F.A. in Poetry at City University of NewYork (CUNY), Queens College. Sunu currently resides in Washington, D.C. with her family.

RAJIV MOHABIR is the author of three collections of poetry including Cultish (Four Way Books 2021) which was awarded the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur, longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Books Award. He also authored the memoir Antiman (Restless Books 2021) winner of the Forward Indies Award for LGBTQ+ Nonfiction. He teaches in the MFA program at Emerson College and lives in the Boston area.

PRAISE FOR MY DEAR COMRADES
“Sunu Chandy’s My Dear Comrades considers the multiple boundaries and borders that the poet crosses into justice: political, social, and the deeply interior. In sure language Chandy shows her own path towards her personal ethics as a mother, a queer daughter, an activated empath searching for a deep love that transforms as it creates community. I have been thirsty for a poetry that demonstrates fierce allyship and what it means for queers of color living in the United States. My Dear Comrades is a map into the heart’s country that abolished borders. Indeed, this collection proceeds from a damaged and flawed world and forges a complicated, abounding beauty.” --Rajiv Mohabir, author of Cultish and Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir

“Sunu Chandy’s My Dear Comrades thrives in that charged space in which politics and personal story connect. Here, each experience pulls the weight of its complicated history; each observation is viewed through the lens of a social justice warrior, but also through a guide leading us toward enlightenment and empathy. Chandy’s poems burst with an empowering energy that’s unshakable, unstoppable.” -Rigoberto González, author of five poetry collections including The Book of Ruin

“In Sunu Chandy’s My Dear Comrades, she turns her exquisite attention toward everyday rituals of violence, indoctrination, and subjugation. Over and over, she interrogates some of our most-metabolized rituals, denying them the safety of invisibility. At the heart of her refusal is a poetics and an ethics of discipline, tenderness, and attention that reminds me of the work of Martín Espada and Audre Lorde. My Dear Comrades is a stunningly lucid and deeply personal work about law and power, race and queerness. Love.” --Aracelis Girmay, author of the black maria and Kingdom Animalia

"At the foundation of My Dear Comrades is a belief in the strength of community, whether that is intimate family, a wider chosen community or a geographically determined general public. Each kind of community deserves-requires-the same kind of care. The attentions these poems give is indeed intimate but their intention and embrace is wide and public. Sunu Chandy is a generous poet, wise and wilful and fierce and kind." --Kazim Ali, author of several books including most recently, The Voice of Sheila Chandra and Northern Light