The Marks of My Hands: Twenty Poems

By Kumar Luv

A word sits on a woman's lips, unsaid. A man rents a room whose only view is a river that is always leaving. A garden is tended for someone who never gets up to see it.

Twenty short poems about love failing to get itself said.

They begin in the small comedies of nearness, a sulk, a held breath, a word kept back, and move through the long silences of absence into the sickroom, the garden and what comes after. A messenger refuses to carry his own message. A woman reads a love poem about herself and asks whether it is about someone else. A man is quietly dumped by the moon.

These are love poems that do not console, and they are frequently funny, which is not the same as being kind. Several of them are about what devotion does to the person it is aimed at. The last poem argues that a love poem only begins to live once something has wrecked it.

Plain language, short lines, nothing decorated. For readers of Arun Kolatkar, Agha Shahid Ali and A. K. Ramanujan. For anyone who has been asked how they are coping and had nothing to say.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H98842B5
• ISBN13: 9798187586936
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 56 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 5.5" x 8.5"