MOTHER TONGUE APOLOGIZE
"Humor--dark, sharp, and often redemptive--permeates this irresistible collection of poems exploring womanhood, family and sexual relationships with the candor of a camera's eye 'blinking to capture one perfect shot.' Preeti Vangani cuts to the heart of each moment like a reporter on the beat; hers is a poetry of the unresolved present and the mercurial future tense. What an extraordinary mind is at work in these pages." —D.A. Powell​
"Mother Tongue Apologize is a collection of poems studying desire and guilt, pleasure and grief, and optimism and dread, all as dualities, and Vangani’s examination of the interplay between these phenomena is skillful, brutally honest, or both." —The Adroit Journal
"What use is poetry to those who grieve, and to those we have lost? Preeti Vangani's Mother Tongue Apologize is just that; poetry as the toughest vessel for memory -- every beautiful and not so beautiful detail of a human life, every fragrance of almond, henna and baby oil, every ailment, every outrage, every firecracker, every love song. This is a gorgeous, finely rendered first poetry collection of mother's absence, of hard love for self, of strong young woman mourning and persisting."
Barbara Jane Reyes​
Preeti’s words are embedded with desperate measures to deal with the raw pain of losing her mother to cancer at one level and to cope with her mum’s patriarchal suppression at home, at another. ‘All letters are odes to spaces mother left behind. Addressed to father never to be sent’, she writes. The fiercely confessional poems expose complex emotions when the poet sees in her mother ‘s dry eyes, ‘a butterfly crushed by a bootheel’. The poems are deeply moving, baring a poignant bond between mother and daughter caught in a universe of separation. The imagery is taut and powerful and quite simply soul stirring.
Vinita Agrawal, author of The Longest Pleasure & The Silk Of Hunger