Things My Grandmother Said: Poems by Amit Majmudar

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Things My Grandmother Said: Poems by Amit Majmudar. Knopf. 2026.

In the acknowledgements to his latest poetry collection, Things My Grandmother Said, Amit Majmudar thanks his editor, Deborah Garrison, “for proposing that [he] organize a collection around the life-giving women who have given life to [his] art.” He names those who “have made [his] literary flourishing possible”: his mother, his wife, his sister, and his daughter. Then he invokes Goethe, whose famous play Faust concludes with a vision of the “Eternal Feminine,” a kind of cosmic, redemptive grace for its fallen protagonist.

“The Eternal-Feminine draws us upward,” the line reads in its entirety. But upward from what? The lure of suave, sardonic Mephistopheles? Maybe, partly. But Majmudar’s ambit is broader than that. Across the collection’s 45 poems, he frames and reframes a related conceit: that, more than merely unimaginable, a world without women would be unintelligible. Life and art (to say nothing of this book) offer endless illustrations, from a newborn’s dependence on its mother to a goddess’s guidance of her divine favorite. In every example – including the more difficult or damaging of the archetypes, such as the manic pixie dream girl – contact with the Eternal Feminine transforms one’s understanding of the world, though not necessarily for the better.

Some of the book’s poems reinforce Goethe’s notion; others object to it. Their competing perspectives might have made for a mishmash had Majmudar not so artfully arranged them into a conversation. The resulting arrangements – clever, provocative, contradictory, resonant – show that Majmudar’s knack for ordering words doubles as a knack for ordering poems. Sometimes a fruitful juxtaposition appears in standard side-by-side fashion: a poem about love horoscopes rubs elbows with a poem about the romances of Françoise Gilot (both Picasso and Salk, incidentally, were Scorpios). Other times the correspondences are farther flung, as when a poem about one’s mother country (and one’s mother’s country) near the start of the book beckons to a poem about one’s mother tongue (and one’s mother’s tongue) near the end of it.

The list of Majmudar’s ladies is long (maybe even longer than Wonder Woman’s legs, which the poet deems “longer than history”), yet nowhere are his debts as clearly drawn as in the pair of eponymous poems, “Things My Grandmother Said” and “More Things My Grandmother Said.” Both present a loosely versified series of sayings.

Turmeric can heal anything
but a broken heart.
I’ve got some Benadryl I bet could shush
that dog of yours. Sounds fun
but what does it pay. You can’t shoot
the spots without shooting the leopard.

The first poem continues for another 28 lines, but these six – and the four bits of wisdom they contain – typify the range of both poems: homespun remedies, acerbic threats, bitter truths, and indelible proverbs like “Every kite forgets its string.” Would it be churlish to chalk many of Grandmother’s sayings up to emotional manipulation? Yes and no. And yet: “Look at all this green / grass and green money,” she announces, apropos of nothing but one’s prospering in an adopted country; “no wonder / every mother’s son / leaves his mother tongue / to come here.”

Patriarchs have their patterns but matriarchs have their matrices. By centering so much of his grandmother’s speech, Majmudar suggests that her way of making meaning – a splendid melange of wry authority, seeming omniscience, and bruise-imparting wisdom – is a byway worth turning into a highway. He makes that shift explicit in a poem knowingly titled “Matriarchy,” in which he proclaims a preference for religions that are “founderless, / theologianless / commandmentless.”

The fewer men in flowing robes, the better.
Best would be grandmothers, lighting incense
in front of the trees their grandmothers planted
and timing their fasts to the moon.
Turmeric on everything from food
to flesh wounds. Smudges of kohl
on baby’s cheek to divert the evil eye.

The poem ends in a cartoon fantasia of “grandmothers circulating like blood cells / through the capillaries of the cosmos,” an image just zany enough to complicate its otherwise conventional form. Unlike “Matriarchy,” many of the book’s other poems take chances with their visual layouts. Several, such as “The Braid” – a poem both about braids and modeled after their interlacing forms – are marvels of aptly patterned sentiment.

And you, too, may take your mother’s
hair in your hands as it turns to white smoke
and divide it, like anything divine, in three

before it vanishes, before she vanishes
letting each part dive through the middle
and you, too, may have taken your mother’s

hip-length coconut-oiled black hair for granted
before it vanished, like anything divine
her arms too weak now to reach back and gather

her hair in her hands as it turns to white smoke
but you will braid it for her today
as you get her ready for the appointment

letting each part dive through the middle
just as she used to braid it when she was a girl
granted black hair shining with coconut oil

down to the hips that would one day give you birth

In a recent Substack essay – “What is Poetry, Really?” – Majmudar argues that a “poet can have any purpose at all in writing a poem, but the pattern is the first point a poem makes.” It’s usually also the last point a poem makes, but that first point is its fulcrum. It’s what T.S. Eliot meant when he wrote that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood,” an acid test “The Braid” passes with seeming effortlessness. That poem’s pattern materializes as an irregular, almost oracular repetition of lines. Its rhymes arrive as images rather than sounds: wisps of smoke rhyme with strands of hair, while the speaker’s deft handiwork finds a fitting analog in the poem’s smooth procession of enjambed lines. That very same smoothness lends itself to the poem’s circularity. The way the poem ends without a period and begins with a coordinating conjunction almost automatically induces rereading, but so too does its fragmentary vignette of filial love. When the son recreates a braid that predates him, he remakes his mother; he remakes himself. How lovely is that?

It’s a playground of a poem for analytic minds, and others like it abound. Consider “Recourse,” a poem so beautiful and hypnotic, so grand in its philosophical treatment of time, it’s a shame its length precludes reproducing it in full.

Still, this book’s deepest appeal exceeds individual analyses. Things My Grandmother Said is more than things his grandmother said; it’s more than the Eternal Feminine, too, as witness the handful of poems that enter through the backdoor with a woman on one arm but precious little to say about her; some even manage to make no mention of women at all. “Reading” – a neat, bookish, dusk-tinged sonnet charting a dreamy encounter between the poet and a blind, lantern-toting Borges – is one, and no sane reader would ever imagine excising it, even for its apparent violation of the book’s spirit. Or perhaps that violation is only apparent. Even here Majmudar is happy to fall back on a trusty truism: he couldn’t have written any of these poems had his mother not first birthed him. And the reader is happy to let him.

Eric Bies is the founding editor of Orange County Review of Books. His work has appeared in World Literature Today, Open Letters Review, and Asymptote.