Born in Mumbai, Sneha Subramanian Kanta is an academician, editor, and award-winning writer residing in Mississauga. She is a 2026 InSitu Artist in Residence at Creative Hub 1352 and a 2025 Woodhaven Artist in Residence at The University of British Columbia Okanagan. She has received a Civic Award of Recognition from the City of Mississauga and a Cultural Award from Heritage Mississauga. She is an author of six chapbooks including Every Elegy Is a Love Poem (Broken Sleep Books), Ancestral-Wing (Porkbelly Press), and Ghost Tracks (Louisiana Literature Press). Her work has been widely anthologized including in The Penguin Book of Indian Poets (ed. Jeet Thayil). She is one of the founding editors at Parentheses Journal.
Leanna Dias: Your pieces develop such a strong relationship with nature and in said pieces your mother and your grandmother share clear environmental voices. So, do you think that without their tenderness and nurturing behaviour for the living, would you have interpreted nature in the same way that you do now?
Sneha Subramanian-Kanta: That’s such an interesting question because I think so much of it is relationality. I don’t think that would have easily been possible because, again it is that nature versus nurture debate, right? It is the privilege of being rooted in a way of belonging through family, where you are gifted a sense of who really introduced you to nature. One of my earliest memories being born and brought up in Mumbai is that of water. It is intriguing because just the other day, Mike Baynham, Professor at The University of Leeds emailed to ask about the meaning of a word in my Hindi poem. Although there is a translation of that poem in English, the word जड़ spoke to him in a different way. This is in reference to the Writing on Air Festival at Chapel FM. I spoke about being carried to playschool through this vast stretch of the Arabian Sea at Juhu Beach. My playschool was just a little ahead and we were blessed to live opposite the beach. We kind of moved through the Arabian Sea as I didn’t like going to the playschool and the sea was a place I’d always wanted to go. My maternal grandmother chose that route to distract me. We interacted with the elements. I’m certain that my relationship with nature would have at some point developed due to this memory of relation.
LD: Even from your poem “How my Grandmother Exited the Last Harbour” you make a lot of floral gestures and there was a line that said “empire will collapse like a flower burst” and I really liked that because it takes something so artificial and human made and then turns it back into nature and inwards to itself.
SSK: I believe to look at and write about empire and flowers is not necessarily mutually exclusive. They are not two distinct things in the way metaphor or cultural erasure would have you believe them to be. What is empire really? It’s like a superstructure in which it is an apparatus of control. My maternal grandmother was a refugee from Karachi, Pakistan during the Partition. When I associate empire with a flower, for instance, I think a flower in and of itself has so many constellations and complex root systems. In that sense for me, juxtaposing the two and bringing them together in a conscious act of disobedience. It is central to my work to explore these possibilities.
This brings me to the important distinction between what mothering is considered in academic spaces. Felicia Rose Chavez in her seminal book The Anti-racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize The Creative Classroom speaks about these disparate ideas. She writes: “Why does emotional care undermine intellectual growth in my colleagues’ minds?” Through her work, I was introduced to Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire. He writes “The ultimate goal of the banking system is to groom students’ passivity so as to better indoctrinate them into the dominant (white) culture.” “Translated into practice,” he reflects on how, “this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.”
This generosity to imbibe living is what extends meaning, changes the shape of words to create language as ritual making for one another. She further extends it to her experiences of parenting as a mother. “Mothering” our students by listening—allowing space for them to use their voices—is an act of humility, it’s an act of conspiring toward mutual learning. When I first had my son, I thought there’s no way it’s possible, passing down this burden of how to be a person: a good boy, a just man. The responsibility felt overwhelming. It wasn’t until later, when I realized just how much I had changed since giving birth, that it dawned on me: My son is training me in how to be a person, too. Teaching is reciprocal.”
LD: That trails into your actual presence in our environment and I wanted to ask if nature is part of your identity or do you find that it is more of a means of provoking self reflection?
SSK: This is such an interesting question because my academic research and creative writing attempts to answer this question. When you bring ecopoetics into the conversation, we begin to introduce juxtaposition. For instance, this same binary you speak about— do I see a separation between nature and ourselves? The answer to that is no. These binaries are the way in which empire, colonization, even capitalism thrives. I continue to work in the research and extension of postcolonial ecocriticism.
LD: In your works you talk about the different places that you've visited and lived in—I’ve seen mentions of Paris, and I know recently as the Woodhaven Artist in Residence at The University of British Columbia and so is home based on a locale? Or is it more an amalgamation of different elements that have resonated with you that construct what you see as home? And in that, is it that you have multiple homes or do you have one place that you are like: “no that is my home nothing else can compare.”
SSK: I was born in Mumbai and lived there for the majority of my life. It is intriguing when someone asks “Have you been home?” What does that mean? Realistically, I do not have a home in Mumbai as of today—I have no relatives I can visit or stay with in Mumbai. I haven’t visited home ever since having immigrated to Canada. During the last 3 – 4 years of my life in Mumbai before leaving for Canada, I have often been away. I was in Europe, and soon after, I was awarded a scholarship and lived in the UK for my education. I then lived in Scotland as a Writer in Residence at The University of Stirling. So home to me is an elegy, a dream, and a remembrance. I know that’s vague but home is not necessarily, at least as it currently is, a physical, tangible space, or a monolithic “hey, that’s home” and I can visit. I definitely believe that Mumbai is the closest definition of what home could mean to me, but I’m not sure if I will recognize the city. I’m actively researching the biodiversity and environmental praxis there. A project in the making touches upon home in a very scientific and archival, research-oriented way through the decades, in the politics of lyric.
LD: I like what you say about how it's not always tangible and how it is like a memory and you deal with that a lot in Every Elegy Is a Love Poem, where there is a lot about recollection, memory, your place, and your mothers passing. Lexically, your poetry explores freedom and I wanted to ask how you decided on those terminologies and how you let it not define exactly what you were going to say, but instead making it a means to say what you want to say instead of it being a limiting factor?
SSK: Your questions about images, form and structure are interesting. As a multilingual creator, I speak and dream in many languages. When I arrive on the page in English I’m looking for words which may encompass a wide spectrum of meaning. I am disobedient with how language was taught to us. There is a perception in the West of folks who have lived or been educated internationally not belonging to the English language. What this assumption does is ignore colonization and how modes of instruction, and I can speak about India, does remain English across states. It is a nation of many languages and cultures, English being one of them.
A beloved friend lives in the Netherlands, she is a poet and painter. She immigrated there when young. She is always telling me the meanings of words in Dutch. I’m one of the only people who she speaks with in English. I’m learning the way in which language twists itself on the page. I have an intimate relationship with language, with how I meld these larger extensions.
LD: Being disobedient is such a key point because when you are writing, as much as there is structure you do have to learn how to break those boundaries. The “Fragments” by Sappho relate to this quite a bit. It is a captivating element with the rest of the collection because it contains so much of what is unsaid. What was important to your message when including that work?
SSK: I read a lot of Anne Carson’s work. I love her translations of the Sappho fragments from Greek. I adore how abstraction is used.
In my work, it does not necessarily let us make sense of things entirely, but you arrive at it. Abstraction is a great way of making sense of both the poem and the world you are inhabiting. An elegy in its most basic sense is about mourning, and what if I have to put joy inside the poem, infuse it with happiness when remembering a person? What if it doesn’t have to idolize a person for adoration, could we rethink their association? What if it comes through joy, shared memories.
LD: In the poems in Every Elegy Is a Love Poem, grief is depicted as a restorative power, and even the title gives sorrow a new perspective, but I first wanted to ask you why you chose to use the unelegies too?
SSK: The un-elegy part of my work arrived much later. It took me a couple of years to realize that I’m not exactly writing an elegy though the subject matter necessitates that definition. I was working to reconstruct form, decolonizing through the written word. I challenge radical obedience and I know I repeat this word, disobedience through the interview. What is obedience, speaking in terminology? To whom are you being obedient and what are you losing in the process? What does a poem look like, appear, behave? What if I were to write against form? Poetry always calls you to reinvent. I always want to speak about un-elegy as a place of belonging as much as an elegy. Both can sit together, even share a cup of tea, but un-elegy is an invented form. It plays with disobedience.
LD: You have a previous chapbook called Ghost Tracks which breaks off from our binary assumptions of what is living and non living. To you, is this a flux with the natural world, a relationship only kindled after death? A kind of boundary crossing.
SSK: First, I’ll speak about blurring and then come to elegy. One of the things that was very important to me at the get go was blurring these lines. We spoke over email about my primary academic research being postcolonial ecocriticism where the colonial mindset of division is questioned. What is an animal? More savage? What is human? Civilized? When India experienced colonization, we were seen as savage, people who need to be taught things. For me, that blurring is deeply intentional because it dismantles false binaries which is the central dichotomy that creates an almost ontological drift. These binaries become a backbone for oppression. This is a conscious decision that comes through my academic research.
As for the elegy part of it, there are multiplicities. Some of my earliest poems engage nature in quite similar ways, but one thing that did change was that after my mother not being physically present in this world, I had a lot of solitude—time with nature. I suddenly would look at things in Mumbai more closely. A lot of people argue that Mumbai doesn’t have seasons but I wouldn’t agree. I began thinking about rivers. The Mithi River looked different from when I was growing up. The river has become a nullah now. What does it mean when capital drives decision-making and people in the city are tethered to the idea of economic prosperity underlying the notion of separated environments? Nature is a mode, not a means to an end.
Leanna Dias was born and lives in Ottawa where she is currently a student at the University of Ottawa for English and Linguistics. She has been part of Common House, the university’s in-house literary magazine since 2024, working now as a Junior Editor.
