Toying with words, hearts

In April 1947, while speaking to a creative-writing class at the University of Mississippi, American novelist William Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, described his contemporary Ernest Hemingway in these words: "He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used."

- Uttaran Das Gupta

Known for his combativeness, Hemingway, who loved boxing and also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, responded: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" No reader of Akhil Katyal's new book of poems, The Last Time I Saw You, is likely to need the dictionary—but they will pause often, provoked into feeling big emotions by his consummate craft. The 19th-century British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously described poetic technique as "the best words in the best order," and Katyal demonstrates a deep self-reflexivity with words.

In the first poem in this collection, Etymology, the narrator traces the origins of words—grief (grever), sadness (saed), pain (poena). It is a prose poem about loss, perhaps the end of a relationship, and it ends—"You left"—and the sentence does not end with a drying up of words.

The mood of the collection oscillates between pensive and playful. In other poems, there are games involving words, such as Scrabble (Scrabble) and crosswords (Ordinary Things).