Girl, Sunsplit: Beautiful Language Tells an Unusual Story

By Creative Nonfiction Editor Stephanie Seguin

Girl, Sunsplit by Neethu Krishnan, was Bacopa’s Creative Nonfiction prizewinner for 2022. One of the things that stood out instantly about this piece was how words were so carefully selected to create beautiful images. In the very first paragraph, "talons" of heat foreshadow the author's painful condition, and the use of the word “snail” perfectly conjures the image of a large procession moving slowly.

I’m cross-legged on my bed, the AC safeguarding me from the talons of South Indian heat. Padding to the dark-tinted, curtained windows of my bedroom, I keen my ear to the thuds and clangs, trying to gauge how long till they snail to the road facing the front of our house.

The language is beautiful throughout, but the words don’t distract from the story itself, that of a young girl reckoning with an unusual illness, at odds with her very environment.  And in fact, the beauty of the images created seem at odds with the anguish the author is experiencing.

A surge of cold cocoons me. Relieved, I nestle into the dryness. I keep my eyes trained on the muted sun, nose-pressed against my window, as the cold kneads its chilly fingers into me, reconstituting me from an infinite incoherence of molecules into a finite and mostly non-ionized human-approximating whole.

When reading creative nonfiction, I am also easily charmed by an unfamiliar world I can spend a few minutes in and feel at home.

Steel plates loaded with rice and curry in hand, we emerge from the dark cave of the bedroom into the corridor, where there’s no dearth of sun. Large sections of the outside-facing walls are criss-crosses of vibrant, kingfisher blue painted wood, just like the twin front doors and their frames. Seating ourselves on the narrow bench and desk in the corridor, we finish our meals, large diamonds of warm light tickling our sweaty backs.

Girl, Sunsplit was a complete immersion into someone else's world, with all the beauty and all the pain. For me, writing like this is what makes creative nonfiction so compelling.

Neethu Krishnan is a writer from Mumbai, India. She holds postgraduate degrees in English and Microbiology and writes between genres at the moment. Her work has appeared in The Spectacle and is forthcoming in Seaside Gothic and the anthology "Dark Cheer: Cryptids Emerging" (Volume Silver) from Improbable Press.

Bacopa Literary Review 2022 Award Winners

FICTION

AWARD: "An Act of Kindness" by Murzban F. Shroff

Murzban F. Shroff is a Mumbai-based writer. His fiction has appeared in 75 literary journals. He is the winner of the John Gilgun Fiction Award and has seven Pushcart Prize nominations. His short story collection, Breathless in Bombay, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and rated by the Guardian as among the ten best Mumbai books. His collection, Third Eye Rising, was featured on the Esquire list of Best Books of 2021. His novel, Waiting for Jonathan Koshy, was a finalist for the Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize and will be published in the U.S. in Fall 2022.

HONORABLE MENTION: "Benny & Bjorn" by Lilia Snowfield Anderson

Lilia Snowfield Anderson was named after a great-great-uncle she never met. Bartending shifts consume her nights and her debut novel draft consumes her days. She lives in a small, Minnesota lake town. Her fiction can be found in The Marrs Field Journal, The Agapanthus Collective, Blood & Bourbon, and more.

 CREATIVE NONFICTION

AWARD: "Girl Sunplit" by Neethu Krishnan

Neethu Krishnan is a writer from Mumbai, India. She holds postgraduate degrees in English and Microbiology and writes between genres at the moment. Her work has appeared in The Spectacle and is forthcoming in Seaside Gothic and the anthology "Dark Cheer: Cryptids Emerging" (Volume Silver) from Improbable Press.

HONORABLE MENTION: "Waiting" by Miki Lentin

Miki Lentin completed an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, was a finalist in the 2020 Irish Novel Fair for Winter Sun, placed highly in competitions including Fish Publishing and Leicester Writers, and published in Litro, Storgy, Story Radio, and MIR, among others. Miki volunteers with the refugee charity Breaking Barriers and with foodkind in Greece, and dreams of one day running a café again.

HUMOR

AWARD: "How Busy I Was" by Marjorie Drake  

Marjorie Drake, after more than thirty years practicing law in Hartford, Connecticut, recently closed her practice to concentrate on her writing. Her work has appeared in Parhelion Literary Magazine, Grey Sparrow Journal, Five on the Fifth, and elsewhere.

HONORABLE MENTION: "Show and Tell to Remember" by Victoria Lynn Smith  

Victoria Lynn Smith writes short stories, essays, and articles. She has been published on Brevity Blog, Wisconsin Public Radio, Moving Lives Minnesota, Better Than Starbucks, 8142 Review, Red Cedar Review, Spring Thaw, Hive Literary Journal, Persimmon Tree, and Jenny. Read more at writingnearthelake.org. 

FORMAL POETRY

AWARD: "Amelia's Freckle Cream" by Shauna Osborn

Shauna Osborn is Executive Director of Puha Hubiya (an Indigenous arts nonprofit). Their poetry collection Arachnid Verve was a finalist for an Oklahoma Book Award. Other honors include a New Poets of Native Nations Scholarship, a Crescendo Poetry Fellowship, and a National Poetry Award from the New York Public Library

HONORABLE MENTION: "All love poems are horror poems when you are the creature" by R. Thursday

R. Thursday (they/them) is a writer, historian, educator, and all-around nerd. When not subverting middle school social studies curriculum, they can be found reading, playing video games, or writing about space, vampires, comic books, queerness, and on good days, all of the above.

FREE VERSE POETRY

AWARD: "Listen to Gala's mutterings" by Sylvia Anne Telfer

Sylvia Anne Telfer is an international award-winning Scottish poet/short story writer frequently published in anthologies and magazines, a qualified English teacher, and one of her jobs was In-House Publications Manager at the University of Hong Kong. She is a campaigner to halt climate change, a feminist, and an equal rights activist.

HONORABLE MENTION: "In the Name of the Name" by Sunyoung Kay

Sunyoung Kay is a poet located near St. Louis, Missouri who is just beginning the journey of revealing the stories held within.

VISUAL POETRY

AWARD: "A Change in Mood II" by Karla Van Vliet

Karla Van Vliet’s newest books are She Speaks in Tongues (Anhinga Press,) poems and asemic writings, and Fluency: A Collection of Asemic Writings (Shanti Arts.) She is a Forward Prize, three-time Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net nominee. Van Vliet is a co-founder and editor of deLuge Journal.

HONORABLE MENTION:"NEWS" by J. Nishida

J. Nishida is a Gainesville poet, writer, editor, tutor, sometimes teacher, and mom. She is one of the hosts of the Thursday Night Poetry Jam at the CMC. She enjoys travel and theatre; studying literature, linguistics, languages, mythology, and fairy tales; and annoying other poets with her experimental poetry.

 

 

Visual Poetry: A Dynamic Interplay

by Bacopa Literary Review Poetry Co-Editor Oliver Keyhani

Fig. 1. Typescract 63
Dom Sylvester Houedard,
1963, 20x12.5 cm

Visual poetry bends the script, the letter, the consonants, the vowels. It allows for a transition from oral tradition to written text to imagery of the written text. Modern visual poetry is as dynamic and diverse as any art form. It can, but does not have to push a dialogue (dialect?) between visual arts and literature, between representation and abstraction, between constructions and deconstructions. 

Visual poetry spans lettering, typography, handwriting, and collage. From the typestracts of Houedard and other typography (Figs. 1 & 2) to concrete poems and calligrams (Fig. 3) that recapitulate the shapes of objects and things, visual poetry allows for a dynamic interplay that connects the eyes and ears in the experience of poetry (click on images to enlarge).

Visual poetry also has a rich history of rebelliousness, whimsy, social commentary, and even scathing political exposure. As stated by Derek Beaulieu, "The libidinal excess typified in concrete poetry is not tied to a biological author, but rather to the excess and waste caused in the production by business machines of 'correct' and legible documents." (Beaulieu, The Last VISPO Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008, pg. 75).

Fig. 2. Calligram, Guillaume Appolinaire

Many visual poets chafe at "accepted conventions of Poetry," and seek to challenge and push boundaries of subject and object, form and function. The "distortion" of text into a visual aspect that cannot be separated from the text itself can be seen as an echo of the "conceptual structure of reality" espoused by Hegel. 

Fig. 3, Amanda Earl

If things exist for actualizing "a priori pure concepts," vis-ual poetry can provide poten-tially unantici-pated sources of "sense impressions" that seem to hint at but can unnervingly obscure underlying concepts of our social reality.

For additional information concerning visual poetry and examples see "Visual poetry: what it is and examples," "Visual Poetry Today," "The Vispo Bible: John," and "Guillaume Apollinaire."