Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry.
- Ebury Press, 2024.

Women Who Wear Only Themselves: Four Travelers on Their Sacred Journeys. 
- HarperOne, 2025.

The Gallery of Upside Down Women.
- BloodAxe Books, 2025

Author: Arundhathi Subramaniam

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Reviewed by Nalini Iyer*

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Arundhathi Subramaniam is a poet and essayist who divides her time between India and the United States. In the last two years, she has published three books that are interrelated. Wild Women is an anthology of poetry in which she has compiled translations of women mystical poets from India, poems by male writers that center women, and poems that feature the goddess such as the Soundaryalahari or Devi Mahatmyam . In Women Who Wear Only Themselves, she interviews four contemporary women on their sacred journeys. The Gallery of Upside Down Women is a collection of Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems that are in dialogue with women poets of the past, with everyday life, and her own journey as a women on a spiritual quest.

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Wild Women is an important anthology—one of the few that covers many centuries of writing and focuses exclusively on women mystics. Some of the poets are familiar names—Mirabai, Andal, Akka Mahadevi. Others are less familiar and they come from a range of spiritual traditions –Buddhist nuns, Sufi mystics,Bhakti poets, tantrikas, and Vedantins. The book is an important compilation of primarily women poets who celebrate the sacred feminine and embrace the mystical, the profane, and the mundane in their poems.

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 In Women Who Wear Only Themselves, Arundhathi Subramaniam writes about becoming a seeker because she was beginning to grapple with questions of truth, loss, belonging and turned to reading the mystics. She writes about four women: Sri Annapurani Amma, Balarishi Vishwashirasini, Lata Mani, and Maa Karpoori. Four very different women and four different journeys but connected by the quest for belonging, seeking the sacred and Divine and almost accidentally ending up as gurus/ spiritual mentors to others.

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In The Gallery of Upside Down Women, she writes poems about women, mysticism, and brings a witty and interrogative approach to women’s sacred journeys. For example, her collection’s title derives from Karaikkal Ammaiyar, a sixth century mystic, who is reputed to have walked upside down. In her poem, “That girl from Karaikkal”, she writes from the husband’s perspective, a rare masculine voice in these poems that lays bare the stark differences between the mystic’s journey and the confusion and mystification of the husband who has mundane expectations about marriage. At the recent JLFSeattle 2025, the crowd favorite was “When Two Women Drink Chai Together” that celebrates the bond between women friends and the pleasure of a cup of tea drunk together.

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Arundhathi Subrmaniam’s writings delight, edify, provoke, and engage the reader, especially women readers, who might see echoes of their own journeys in her words.

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*Dr. Nalini Iyer is a Professor in English, Seattle University, Washington, USA. Contact: NIYER@seattleu.edu