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Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Ranu Uniyal’s This Could Be a Love Poem for You begins with intimate loss and widens into a meditation on mortality, time and the fragile ties that make life meaningful. In John Thieme’s September 21, 2025 review for Scroll.in, the collection’s metapoetic artistry—the poems’ attention to their own language and forms—works alongside raw feeling. The result is not a neat passage through grief, but a varied and emotionally candid collection that keeps loss in view while making room for kindness, faith, doubt and hope.
From a mother’s death to the transience of existence
Thieme reads the collection as moving outward from personal bereavement toward questions that touch everyone: what remains of us when someone dies, and how do we live with the knowledge that life is temporary? The poet’s mother is central to several poems. Her death is not presented as a loss that can simply be put behind the speaker; it also means losing a part of the self formed in relation to the person who has died.
In “I Cannot Answer,” the speaker imagines a future shaped by Alzheimer’s and a lonely funeral, yet remains attached to life, still “cling[ing] to life.” The poem holds fear and persistence together rather than resolving one into the other. Elsewhere, grief appears as a stalker: a presence that follows the speaker, with “good days” offering only temporary reprieves.
That persistence matters to the collection’s emotional character. The poems acknowledge the transient without turning mortality into an abstract theme; the awareness grows from close, personal experience. As Thieme puts it, “There are no easy resolutions in the collection.”
#1 Best Overall
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How the poems make grief part of their subject
The collection is attentive not only to what grief feels like, but also to what happens when a poet tries to put it into words. In “Grief,” writing the feeling down becomes an act of elegy. Across the book, poems reflect on the genres and language they use, making the making of poetry part of the subject rather than a separate display of technique.
That self-awareness does not, in Thieme’s reading, cancel emotional force. Instead, form gives the poems ways to approach experiences that may resist direct statement. “The Eternal Truth,” for example, frames existence through grammar and tense, bringing questions of time into the poem’s language itself.
Rank #2
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A formal range beyond free verse
Free verse predominates, but Thieme describes a collection that moves among several forms and strategies. The shifts are not merely decorative: the poems draw on inherited patterns, playful structures and prose to approach different aspects of loss and living.
- Villanelle: “An April to Remember” uses the repeating form to give its subject a patterned, returning shape.
- Nursery-rhyme play: “Jill on the Hill” reworks nursery-rhyme material with a feminist turn.
- Prose-poems: “The Audacity of Living” and “Why Do I Write?” use prose-poem form.
- A poetic menu: The five-line “Lockdown Sunday Menu” names forms including the villanelle, free verse, sonnet, epic and rhymed poetry in response to lockdown.
Stitching is another recurring image. It first suggests wounds and dreams left unstitched, then shifts toward love and literal crochet. The movement makes repair imaginable without suggesting that every hurt has been mended.
Rank #3
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More than a book about bereavement
Grief and mortality are central, but the collection also attends to women’s expectations and experiences of violence, spiritual possibility, and the poet’s relationship with her disabled son. Thieme identifies a continuing dialogue between grief and kindness, faith and doubt, loss and hope. These are not competing themes that cancel one another out: the poems can hold pain alongside the possibility of care.
For readers approaching the collection as a love poem, that breadth is significant. Love is not confined to romance or offered as a cure for grief. It appears in the bonds that make loss consequential, in family relationships, and in the possibility of kindness amid uncertainty.
Rank #4
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Book details
Red River Press identifies This Could Be a Love Poem for You as Ranu Uniyal’s fourth collection of verse. Its listed edition is 96 pages, ISBN 978-93-48111-02-9. The publisher’s page includes a direct purchase option; check the page for current price and availability.
Quick Recap
Best Value
- Hardcover notebook with line-ruled pages (front and back); ideal for notes, lists, journaling, and more
- 240 pages
- Archival quality; acid free
- Expandable inner pocket for storing loose items
- Includes bookmark and elastic closure
Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.
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