Inheritance of Air: A Poem

By Scott Ferry and Aakriti Kuntal

Another fine book from Meat For Tea Press.

Aakriti Kuntal and Scott Ferry achieve something masterful in this new collaboration-Inheritance of Air. Poets have always stood at the crossroad where miracles and catastrophe collide-they do more than report the news-they eat the world around them then give back beautiful and terrifying flowers. Scott-"ransom is not needed/let the prey take/its kill/into the dark." Or the wickedly subtle-"i am the leaves fallen/ and the buds/and the sticky liquid wicked up all of the stems."

There is great love in these poems-both poets caring for one another as well as for the reader-for the strength to take one more step and then another-I am amazed reading this book at the courage it took to write it. Aakriti-"My back- swivels and shifts inside the margins/returning from the dialysis centre./What is it like to wake/and then think that your death has been postponed for another day"

Both poets speak of the body as a vessel in which consciousness struggles to overcome and ultimately outlasts decay-Scott-"there is no address in the gap between myself/and what i have stolen from/a black-beaked/twin"

These poems so beautifully wrought describe a near Homeric journey inward where the monsters-the angels-the dripping fluids from stony-eyed sirens enthrall as well as entomb the reader-Aakriti-"Days become hard like eggshells/and then boil into soft clumps./Mother, my face is as pale as the month./Why do I stare out the window?"

Not since the wonderful essay-Poetry Now Is As Necessary As Ever-by Kate Farris and Ilya Kaminsky have I seen a collaboration with the power-the humanity-and the reach of Inheritance of Air.

-Gary Lemons, author of Collateral

These poems sing: a magical duet where language sings what is beneath language. And strangeness and beauty sing what is beneath strangeness and beauty - naturally, more strangeness and beauty. In their profound, incantatory ostranenie, these poems are us on language and they are language on us.

-Gary Barwin, author of The Comedian's Book of the Dead

we were poets inside our own bodies
a dream world where the dreamers having slit their wrists in almost unison. Write. Write like they are about to run out of the only dream that can save them. From waking up. A dream shall arrive
. . . Eat my soft face Lick the death in my ice eyes Inheritance of air is not just poetry. It is breath resurrected.

- Naveen Kishore, publisher, poet, lighting designer

Reading this book is akin to eavesdropping on a conversation between kindred spirits. Scott and Aakriti are aligned in skill, sensibility, and most fundamentally, by a knowledge of the challenges of living within 'the barbed wire fence' of the human form. These murmured exchanges do not settle for facile hope or easy closure. They are unafraid to venture into the grotesque, the infectious, the unresolved, and when they emerge, something unflinching seems to unite them. The reader is left trusting their clear-eyed, hard-won willingness 'to love the earth a little longer'.

- Arundhathi Subramaniam, author of The Gallery of Upside-Down Women

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HKD4LSL3
• ISBN13: 9798175466431
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 86 Pages
• Weight: 0.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 8.5"