Our Tomorrows Preserve a Love That Will Come
Heliotropia, Manahil Bandukwala. Brick Books, 2024
Five hundred years later in the 24th century,
starship captains will travel millions of light years
in search of humanity’s specialness.
As though there is not enough love on Earth. (25)
Manahil Bandukwala’s latest book, Heliotropia, is a dreamy and atmospheric collection of speculative poems. With a focus on love, hope and wonder, this book finds the beauty in everyday moments and explores the intricacies of love. Every poem is rooted in love — from describing a blossoming relationship to travelling in outer space. The poet commands readers’ attention through her profound insights about the power of love and offers hope for a brighter tomorrow.
The book opens with a long poem titled “Seventeen Months of Distance,” which feels like a constellation of the different moments that made up a period of long distance in the poet’s relationship with her partner. Beginning with the more recent past and working backward to the early moments of the relationship, this section of the book offers a sense of comfort and steadiness. Through distance, imagined underwater worlds and alternate realities, love and longing are the emotions that unite the poems, with a sense of hope underlying it all.
One of my favourite quotes in Heliotropia is from “Seventeen Months of Distance”: “Our tomorrows / preserve a love that will come” (19). This belief that love will exist tomorrow, as if love is always waiting for us, is also noted in Bandukwala’s acknowledgements where she writes, “Heliotropia is for everyone who believes in a tomorrow filled with love” (99). This is such a beautiful idea — we don’t know what tomorrow will bring but we can hope that it is filled with love. This concept perfectly captures the tone of this book, and provides a calm sense of hope that has stayed with me long after reading.
In “Space Opera,” another long poem in the collection, Bandukwala uses the vastness of the universe to mimic the expansiveness of love. She discusses love and souls alongside immersive imagery of galaxies and dying stars. This combination feels spiritual and intimate. Like “Seventeen Months of Distance,” “Space Opera” is united by love, but there’s also an awareness of the impermanence of life: “we reach for time but it explodes leaving blisters etched in our palms / we hold the countdown to a cataclysmic flare in the space between us” (64), and “we are the decaying galaxy swirling hand in hand” (79). Despite this, the characters within the poem find solace in love and home within each other.
“Space Opera” is just one example of how Bandukwala plays with popular speculative fiction concepts. Typical representations of concepts like alternate realities, ending worlds and terraforming planets are built with urgency, but the poems within Heliotropia present a softer and quieter side of the genre by focusing on the characters and their relationship. This interstellar poem, and the other poems in this collection, are made grander because they are grounded in love.
Love is one of the main themes in this collection, but it’s informed by shadows of grief and loss. In addition to “Space Opera,” mentions of grief are scattered throughout the book: “We are never ready / to absorb the emptiness of loss, but must / pause to howl at the chameleon of being” (17), and “One day I’ll be a ghost, lingering outside / all the places I didn’t get to see” (25). Grief is especially present in the poems “1996” and “Threshold Ghazal.” In “1996,” the poet reckons with death and regret but knows she would never change a thing about her life. Heliotropia holds space for both love and grief, and continually chooses love even through grief. If “1996” is a reckoning with death, perhaps the poem “Love Language” can be seen as a response — a commitment to life and declaration to live: “Every day / I practice [sic] being alive. Try to fall / in love with something new” (39). “Love Language” uses love as a lens through which to see the world because “Even at its most difficult / love is worth loving” (39).
In “Threshold Ghazal,” Bandukwala meditates on a different kind of grief: the loss of cultural connections.
My grandparents are making their home / somewhere I won’t ever
enter, in a room woven / with old saris and lined with books in
languages I haven’t / learned to read. I know so much less. The sari
room / has a threshold impossible to cross. A border is made up / of
more than checkpoints and guns. (35)
This poem is a reckoning with cultural loss but it also feels like a reclamation because it attempts to break down the border discussed within it. “Threshold Ghazal” is a powerful reflection on loss and home.
Other standout poems include “Archive of love and botany,” “Watching Star Trek with you,” “Terraforming the sun,” “Moro no Kimi,” and “An AI takes in ten thousand cat videos.” At times playful and other times serious, this collection showcases a range of experiences and feelings related to the theme of love. Bandukwala has crafted a tender and hopeful poetry collection that seeks to find love in everyday moments, poems that are a testament to the practice of being alive and choosing love.
By centring love and wonder within poems about nature and the universe itself, Bandukwala gives readers a collection that speaks to the heart. This book offers a moment to slow down and revel in the power of love. Gentle and defiant, Heliotropia is a radiant light in the dark.
— Helena Ramsaroop (she/her) is an Indo-Guyanese Canadian freelance editor, book reviewer and bioarchaeologist.
Read this review and many others in Issue 303 (Spring 2025). Order the issue now:
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