Described by the Independent as a 'one-woman, agit-prop literary-political movement', Meena Kandasamy is a poet, writer, translator, anti-caste activist and academic based in India. Her extensive corpus includes two poetry collections, Touch (2006) and Ms Militancy (2010), as well as three novels, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You (2017) and Exquisite Cadavers (2019).

This impassioned, compelling collection moves between rhythmically rich evocations of friendship, motherhood, love and sex. and urgent political topics: caste prejudice, freedom of expression, racism and the oppression of women and LGBTQ+ people. In the title poem, addressing the arrests of two human-rights activists in India in 2015, we see the violence of the corrupt state revealed: "Tomorrow someone will arrest you. The day after that, you / will be considered a 'terrorist' for life ... Long Live Silence." Kandasamy's writing is fierce and direct in its criticism of this deadening, suffocating silence, and those in power who perpetuate it. These vital, beautiful poems burn with a radically illuminating rage.