The 'process note’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Preeti Vangani are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.
My second collection of poems, Fifty Mothers (2026), is in several ways a continuation of my first book, Mother Tongue Apologize (2019). Placing them side by side, I can feel the hot urgency that drives the first collection. It was the first time I processed my mother’s death through poems. Processed anything through poems. Before a life in poems, I punched in and out of a job in consumer marketing for eight years. Once I severed myself from the life of crunching out sales forecasts in open plan offices and turned to studying poetry, the poems came quick, and fierce. I wrote like a zealot, taking miracles in any form and shape they came. Mother Tongue Apologize became a volume holding visual poems, spatial experiments, prose blocks, ghazals, a poem in the shape of a clock.
Fifty Mothers, I sense, is its older, calmer sister. When writing the poems that ultimately became the book, although not sure of the book's final shape, I felt certain about one idea: that the book must embody joy. Although the book's central impulse is elegy; it is a tribute to my gone mother, my father's witnessing of her passing, and our family's sharp-edged griefs, I couldn't imagine a world on the page where we weren't laughing, feasting, scoring stuffies at the gaming parlor. As the poems unfold in the book now, the speaker's mother figures expand to include her aunts, friends, stepmother, she even sees a mother in the option of getting an IUD.
While writing this book, I’d introduce early drafts of these poems at readings by saying, I want to know what happens to grief when I examine it through the passage of time. What happens to grief when pickled in a jar over years? Doing away with the urgency of transcribing my experience of early grief made room for deep reflection. It made room to move away from the site of the tragic event and ask questions about love. I asked in poems—of my father, my family, myself—now how do we go on loving each other in the aftermath of loss? How has the texture of our love changed? Where are our claws now? Where are our soft paws?
Doing away with the need to be urgent also made room for music. As distance from the traumatic event grew, I noticed internal rhyme and metricality entering the poems. Room for sonic joy. Room for singing. Room for leisure and pleasure. A song lyric tapped at my heart throughout. Yahan sab kuch hai ma phir bhi/ bin tere lage mujhko akela. Here there’s everything mother/ yet without you I am alone. It became therefore my obsession to record the ‘everything’, the abundance of life, in the face of my mother’s erasure through death. In poems like “One Cup of Chai,” I explored abundance by playing with the idea of how much a single sentence could embody—in one sentence’s capaciousness, reality, and imagination, cowardice and courage, could be brewed in the same pot. Monostich as a mode to embody the vastness of guilt, of love. Lists became another sensorially lush way to take inventory of joys in our realm, a way to show myself that yes, pleasure is concurrent to pain, living to loss. The poems, “It Almost Kills Me” and “Raising Mothers “were composed out of this desire to be enveloped by muchness. The word not as bounty, as in that’s not nothing.
My first book begins with a poem called “Unremember,” whose first line goes, One way of getting you back is. Getting closer to my mother continued to remain my haunting. Just as Dana Levin says, poetry is an endurance technology, I often feel that an elegy is an intimacy technology. I ache to get my mother back. In Fifty Mothers, some of this ambition was resurrected by inviting pages from my mother’s college diary as photographs into the manuscript. Another way to resurrect her spirit found fruition in writing a series of poems in the gone mother’s voice. They allowed me to rid myself of the pressure of sorrow an elegy must hold, and instead be delightfully weird and whimsical in remembering my mother. In other words, I was tired of being sad. The gone mother persona arrived as a playful, irreverent, chatty voice, approximating my mother’s levity and lightheartedness. The voice cracked jokes with and at the grieving daughter, gave her atrocious bits of advice, offered her a remedy of honey and cinnamon. In one poem, here below, the gone mother asserted her anger and desires in the form of her bucket list.
I found myself returning to books by Sharon Olds, Ross Gay, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil whenever I needed to believe in the possibilities of starting from a place of wonder. Of grace and gratitude. I hope the book lands with the reader as a testament to joy being central to the life of grieving and the life of making poems.
Gridlock
My boyfriend did not leave me because I had arthritis that would make caring for his parents difficult. That was his official reason. My body held that deficiency until he told me why, truly—I’d been with several men while he had been only with me. He couldn’t understand why I’d stop at him. I loved him. I loved that he cut up tough meats on my plate into bite-sized pieces when my degenerating fingers couldn’t compel a knife. I used to delay scratching down his back, a gesture that instantly made him come. His house was on Saat Rasta, seven roads radiating from a traffucked circle. The evenings I drove to him, citing overtime at home, my widower father would ask the maid to not cook dinner. Cooking dinner for one is wasteful. I sought love at the expense of my father’s hunger, his shoddy supper of roadside bunmaska or anda-pav. I am starving you to fetch you a groom, Papa, long-term gain! I did not say. I never felt guilt, only anger at my father’s unwillingness (not inability) to care for himself. To re-strike a friendship, I met my (ex)boyfriend for a late night show at the Imax dome. My phone died. The film was Life of Pi. I will resist the lush metaphors that the movie provides because this is no time for meandering by beauty. When you live on your father’s clock, there is no time for meandering. I drove home to find my father had alarmed aunty-uncle-cousins to track me down. Cabbed through the city to trace my whereabouts. My father shepherd-dogging me. I shepherd-dogging boy(s) simmering their sticky outbursts. From within the cramped motor-whirring centre, arose spokes and exhaust fumes.
My Gone Mother Sends Her Bucket List
Instead of me spitting cherry seeds
into a steel bowl at the edge of prime
time
cliffhangers, and him scramming down
to the paan-shop, sucking
abrasive puffs of Navy Cuts in
intellectual-husbands-circle-jerks,
happiness. Or is this a happy marriage—
this productive looking away?
Lonely? I am not lonely by any means
I am allowed one friend—my
sister-in-law.
Our ears pierced identical by
mother-in-law cusses: Chambo,
chhori.
To you, my paw, girl.
Such unround rotis you’ll feed my boy?
For the fed boy to pet my sacrum.
1 glass of water.
1 cold coffee with vanilla ice-cream.
Do I not pepper pain with pleasure,
god,
if you buy a woman into a house
allow her no trade, no friends
allot her an allowance
tighter than the sprout
of a prostitute’s cleavage
how can the Great Almighty
be enough.
Not just the rosary’s grip,
a budget holiday trip
a silky slip and garnet rings
and diamonds— not under the permissible
hoax of constructing a trousseau
for daughter’s marriage. For me.
A paint job for the gangrene walls and
nails
box-filed at the beauty parlor
1 microwave
1 ironing table (not daughter’s study
table doubling up)
1 dignified shelf in kitchen for my
gods
not this floor-level miscellaneous
drawer
(no wonder the divines aren’t giving a
crap about me)
1 chilled beer
1 burning touch
1 pure electric and narcotic thrill
of unstitching
my heavy heart open
to the man who snores and drools
in my armpit
without being told,
Enough
without being
told to Stop
behaving like such a woman
Freedom Movement
My mother used to yell from the bathroom, I just want five more minutes!
Preeti Vangani is a poet and writer from Bombay based in San Francisco. She is the author of the poetry collections, Mother Tongue Apologize (2019) and Fifty Mothers (River River Books, 2026). Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner among other places. Her debut short story won the 2021 Pen/Dau Emerging Writers Prize. Vangani has been a resident at UCross, Djerassi, and Ragdale. She has received artist grants from San Francisco Arts Commission, YBCA, and The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She holds an MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco and teaches in the program.
Fifty Mothers: https://bookshop.org/p/books/fifty-mothers-poems-preeti-vangani/38d527c263fa717c?ean=9798988137894&next=t
Maw Shein Win’s latest full-length
poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her
previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House
(Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry
and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently
been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The
Bangalore Review, and other literary journals. She is the inaugural poet
laureate of El Cerrito, CA, and the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime
Achievement Awardee. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts
and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. She teaches
poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Low
Residency MFA Program at Dominican University. Along with Dawn Angelicca
Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a
literary community. mawsheinwin.com
