It’s a rare pleasure to read a debut and know you’re seeing the author at the beginning of a long, successful career. But that’s how I felt reading Heat Death of the Universe (fifth wheel press, 2023), the debut chapbook of emerging poet Leela Raj-Sankar. In Heat Death, Raj-Sankar follows up her prolific 2022—which she capped off by scoring one Pushcart and two Best of the Net nominations—with an evocative, sharply-written debut that explores chronic illness, young love, and the pains of growing up.

Raj-Sankar’s vivid rendering of the Sonoran Desert provides the backdrop for Heat Death. She captures desert life through carefully-chosen details, like “the rusting AC / creaking with sounds of overuse,” “chlorine-stained hair,” and the daily ritual of checking her shoes for scorpions. The desert is searing and airless, yet wildly bright: a fact of life, a forsaken island, a brutal road to salvation—such as in the poem “Cactus Wren,” which begins “The poppies are redder than blood and I have become / a prey animal, anxiously awaiting / a miracle, my mouth / thickened and cottony with the stench / of desire.” Heat Death maps experiences that, like the desert sands, are almost too hot to touch, but Raj-Sanker goes there anyway, with equal parts verve and grace. 

Raj-Sankar’s struggle with chronic illness is woven throughout Heat Death. Her poems situate themselves in the liminality created by illness: days curled up in bed in the midst of migraines, hours staring into space inside of MRI machines. She discusses how illness influences her daily life, manipulates time, and confounds identity. “I couldn’t write that summer,” she mourns in “High Tide in a Landlocked State.” “Couldn’t lift a pen, or a spoon to my / mouth, or do much other than watch the fan spin lazily above me, once, / twice, three times.” As someone who has struggled with migraine and headache issues for close to a decade, I’m painfully familiar with the desperate calculus of “aubade after migraine cluster”—“It’s just simple brain / chemistry: if I can endure the next five minutes I can endure / the next fifty years”—and the frustration of “High Tide”—“The ocean is most romantic when you think you might be / dying. I wasn’t. In the end, I was just a sick girl who didn’t want / to be sick anymore.” 

But although Raj-Sankar is realistic about the effect that illness has on her life, Heat Death’s outlook is not ultimately hopeless. One of the most memorable images in the collection appears at the end of “aubade after migraine cluster,” when Raj-Sankar emerges from her bedroom after a long migraine. Adjusting from the four-day darkness, she amazedly notices small details around her like the soft golden sunrise, fresh coffee, and jazz drifting from the kitchen. “Even after the world ends / it goes on,” she writes. “Even after the world ends it says: wake up. Jazz is playing in the kitchen. / You are going to live.” 

Raj-Sankar explores the slipperiness of identity not just through the lens of chronic pain, but also through the lens of growing up Indian-American. In “Fantasia,” one of the most technically ambitious pieces in Heat Death, she reckons at length with her heritage, developing the tension of the poem’s line breaks and white space in tandem with the rising tension of her words. And in other poems, such as “SECOND-GENERATION ANTI-LOVE LETTER,” she explores the trials of adolescent love. As she reads a book of shoddy love poetry gifted to her by her significant other, she reflects on the large and small places of disconnect between the two of them:

“[. . .] You say you’ll
name the sun for me and I think, in which language? In which
season? April turns my head fuzzy so
I tell you to lie in the grass with me. Inke va, my throat is so
dry. What I am trying to say is I love you but
I can’t call you meri jaan. What I am trying to say is that
you should open your windows so you can hear me singing from
ten miles away.”

And in a gut-punch ending to the poem, she concludes, “What I am trying to say is / I need you to learn to pronounce my name.” As in “Fantasia,” language creates—or uncovers—sites of friction between different aspects of Raj-Sankar’s life experiences. Throughout Heat Death, Raj-Sankar writes through these frictions with both melancholy and hope, wisdom and wryness.
I will end on the note that Raj-Sankar’s poetry is simply a great pleasure to read. Her command of rhythm is outstanding; these poems glide, cut, sing, and snap, all without a hitch. Although Raj-Sankar is young, she writes with perceptiveness and skill that many older writers lack. With Heat Death of the Universe, Leela Raj-Sankar has established herself as a writer to watch.

Eleanor Ball is a queer writer from Des Moines, Iowa. She has been published in Barnstorm, DEAR Poetry, Write or Die, and elsewhere, and her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions. She is currently pursuing her M.A. in Library & Information Science.