Preface

Notes from Reality in Transit is a personal investigation of the pluralities of identity; how we exist in the pauses between moments, constantly shifting; our thoughts refracted by the present moment, language, culture, memories, and the act of remembering itself.

With Notes, I set out to write using techniques of abrupt shifts in thought, linguistic play, layered metaphors, and deliberate interruptions, to explore the fundamental and temporal instability of meaning, creating an experience where the reader actively pieces together a subjective truth rather than passively consuming an authorial narrative. A temporally fluid and kaleidoscopic exploration of memory and perception.

In the first sections, like My mother cultivated very particular gardens, childhood memories blur into reflections on displacement. Generational wisdom and cultural practices immerse the Anglophone reader in a culturally distinct yet universally resonant experience of growing up. My mother holds my palm lines as we take the stairs up to a palm reader captures the tension between responsibility and innocence, while How do you separate personalities from personal predicaments? reflects my evolving perspectives on identity. The last section, Present in the Present to Present , ties these ideas together, maintaining fragmentation, resisting coherence, and leaving the reader suspended in the fluidity of memory and meaning.

Notes traces an arc from childhood to adulthood, though not in a conventional sense; the pacing accelerates and decelerates, the forms grow more experimental, and multilingualism further fractures the text's cohesion. Parisian rooftops and hallucinations sit alongside childhood card games. Nepali phrases and European landscapes exist not as exoticized flourishes but as equal fragments of a diasporic consciousness. The jaulo eaten during Dashain and the vin chaud sipped at the Marché de Noël are threads in the same tapestry of a multilingual and multicultural existence, their dissonance deliberate, and their coexistence as natural as my own.

The 'self' in this collection refuses to be geographically or linguistically fixed, embracing the discomfort of liminality instead. Inspired by the principles of Language Poetry, treating the text as an "open field," and by Lyn Hejinian's masterpiece My Life, I write using an alternative form called the "new sentence," solidifying these "open texts" as prose poems composed mainly of sentences with no clear transitions. But where her work often surrounds abstraction, mine clings to the body: tears provoked by a sudden wind, the weight of a lover's arm, the smell of rat poison. The prose poems oscillate between visceral immediacy and metaphysical abstraction, mirroring the unreliability of perception. Thus, the text becomes a living entity, each section with its own rhythm.

This tension between the cerebral and the corporeal, between an illusion of coherence and the chaos of an "open text," mirrors the central paradox of the work: writing as both a tether to thought and an escape from it, the text as both being written 'by' the author, and the authorial inside-voice as well as outside-self being created through the text. Here, modernist stream-of-consciousness collides with the raw self-scrutiny of confessional poetry, while surreal juxtapositions fracture any illusion of stability. By the final pages, the illusion of coherence is fully dismantled. The closing lines, I cannot close my six senses; I was born this way (a participant), highlight perpetual incompleteness.

At its core, Notes from Reality in Transit is an account of becoming. It rejects the polished artifice of traditional narrative. There are no answers here, only the residue of a mind in motion, a testament to how language, memory, and identity are not constructed but lived.