Howrah Bridge

poems by

Srinivas Mandavilli

~ 48 pages, $13 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: June/July 2025

An Advance Sale Discount price of $8 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $12/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. 

PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.

Srinivas Mandavilli is Chief of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at Hartford Hospital and the author of the chapbook Gods in the Foyer (Antrim Books, 2016). His work has been featured in the anthologies Hum Aiseich Bolte (Trancscendent Zero Press, 2022) and Of Hartford in Many Lights (Grayson Books, 2024) as well as numerous literary journals including Rattle, Poetry Wales, The Night Heron Barks, New Square, Modern Haiku, The Raven’s Perch, Verse Virtual, and Journal of the American Medical Association. Mandavilli is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and lives in Connecticut with his wife Bela.

The heartfelt poems of Howrah Bridge are Srinivas Mandavilli’s “faithful work of returning” to India, to childhood, to memories that “rise and fall like a rainstorm . . . over the Ganges.” Archetypal and culturally specific, his memories bridge past and present selves. Part “good son,” part Krishna, part tiger, Mandavilli seeks clarity, plumbing the depths, tasting pain and delight as he would the seeds of a pomegranate. His poems savor and heal. ~Margaret Gibson, Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut 2019-2022

“My offering is poetry,” writes Srinivas Mandavilli in his stunning collection, Howrah Bridge. Indeed, these lush and vibrant poems do the “faithful work of returning.” Whether visiting a homeland of blackouts with “rain like incantations,” cardamom and roses, man-eating tigers and venomous snakes, or tending a mother, and later carrying her ashes. Whether wandering the Ganges, or buying frozen roti at Costco, Howrah Bridge evokes the imperative, redemptive–even sacred–possibilities of memory and of poetry. ~Tina Cane, Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, Emeritus and author of Year of the Murder Hornet

Fathoms

Father carried a nimbus of being larger-than-life, halting
the superfast Toofan Mail by running to its engine.

One must return to “big things”,
like the Taj Mahal, or the pyramids in Giza.
I remember him in the depths of lividity.

Some wounds heal. He always expertly removed
splinters from my finger with a safety pin.

On my return home he laughed, ascribing
the visit as a hope to find or discover him.
That day, he sat bare-chested at the dining table,

splaying open pomegranates on a steel plate for my snack.
It was a bloody mess.

When I left, I saw the tonnage
0f his hardwood plank-like back
I used to walk on, when very young.

As my flight surges to plumbs of some vastness,
I hear the sonorous moan of wind, like a whale song.

Blowout

As a boy, after a visit from the turbaned snake man, I survey bamboo thickets at dusk for stirrings of elliptical heads with dark hood marks. As he begins with his gourd-like flute, reaching into a wicker basket, Father sends him packing with a typical outburst. That summer, the burning and heat turns us out of ourselves, as the clouds ruptured over our heads. We imagine geysers of slick flame on a platform, ash dropping like rain on helmets of the oil rig hands as they run to cap a spigot. He never speaks about the recapping of the rig after his return. That night he irons my white starched shirt, carefully avoiding the glossing of the stitched school badge, and polishes my black leather shoes. I see the blowout when a brown, fat snake slithers from rumor to reality, curling up in the study. Father bludgeons it with a hockey stick, then stands over as the paroxysm of anger slides into some dark burrow. I never understood how fear of fangs and venom can rise like that

creature’s muscles
pulsating to music like
insistent thunder

Trypophobia

The closest blackhole resides in Telescopium,
invisible yet kindling with its corona of radiation.
Everything obscures to its center point
of no return. Objectively, I cannot make it out.

Deven lived with us for many summers. I was
twelve or fourteen, ignoring his practicing
the bamboo bansuri; how breath escapes
six holes, his long fingers closing, then lifting.

We debated whether Rajdhani Express, or Howrah Mail
was the fastest, but past Siliguri we traveled in coal
engine trains belching, puttering into long tunnels.
Does a tunnel have one or two holes?

At times how it can feel to be in a gap, a gash
in the ground where there is rock, or even a wall with
a zoetrope of names. These days are tethered
to apprehension, viral particles penetrate pores in cell

membranes. I escape a marooned city to Scarborough
Marsh, watch cormorants congregate on a white wooden board,
dark eyes gleam in the ebbing light, as they quiver
off wetness, then quietly drift into some ellipses

as if farrowing into the retreating tide. Crown crusted
virus—you must bide in this moment, spikes tense,
evaluating our deep sleep from some glacial maw.
When I was a little boy, each winter my mother knitted

slightly ill-fitting sweaters, with colors like blackberry,
plums or oranges, and later fearful of their moth-eaten holes.
Sifting flour, Mother had furrows of worry,
the vermilion dot numinous like a supernova.