In this debut collection, Puloma Ghosh spins tales of creatures and gore to explore grief, sexuality, and bodily autonomy. Embracing the bizarre and absurd, Mouth stretches reality to reach for truth.
“Desiccation” follows a teen figure skater with necrophiliac fantasies who is convinced the other Indian girl at the rink is a vampire. When a woman returns to Kolkata in “The Fig Tree,” she can’t tell if she is haunted by her dead mother or a shakchunni ― or both. “Nip” bottles up the consuming and addictive nature of infatuation, while “Natalya” is a hair-raising autopsy of an ex-lover. In “Persimmons,” a girl comes to terms with her own community sacrifice.
Full of fangs and talons, Mouth lays bare the otherwise awkward and unmentionable with a singular sharpness. Through surreal and captivating prose, Puloma Ghosh delves into otherworldly spaces to reimagine ordinary struggles of isolation, longing, and the aching desires of our flesh.
Puloma Ghosh is a fiction writer based in Chicago whose work has appeared in One Story, CRAFT Literary, Cutleaf, and other publications.
Review: Reckoning with our own monstrosity, Chicago Review of Books
Read: Natalya in Cutleaf Journal
Prompt: Borrow a non-creative form such as a recipe, legal document, instruction manual and have a go at writing a story using this shape. Remember to use the terminology and structure of the non-creative form.