Description
Praise
About the Author

Aerial Roots is a poetry collection that meditates on the liminal space of displacement and settlement, arrivals and departures, uprootedness, and assimilation. It is between these hybrid shifts of time and place, of bilocation, that diasporic writers dwell for most of their lives.

Visualising the ongoing narratives as akin to the banyan tree and its allegorical roots, the poems revisit the vast canvas of memory, places, and lived experiences. This collection negotiates and interrogates the complex issues of identity, ethnicity, belonging, heritage, and multiple homes to know where and what home is.
“These poems take us to the minutiae of the author’s beloved landscapes, familiar haunts and remembered neighbourhoods, but a new, rich tapestry of sights and sounds; of ethnic variety and riches. This is food for the soul; part of a significant journey of discovery, recall and recovery, a traveller’s recognition of how nature’s beneficence is a palpable blessing no matter where one is in the world.”
—Anne Lee Tzu Pheng

“Tender. Present. Generous. Dignified. Shilpa Dikshit Thapliyal’s Aerial Roots is a deeply contemplative collection, intelligent and lustrous in its surfacing of rich feeling and authenticity. Perambulating around the banyan tree are poems laced in heavy symbolism. Threaded through are astonishingly beautiful images and sounds. The confessional moments meander their way confidently through verse, from the ghazal and haibun to prose poem. One becomes witness to a fondness—of memory, of nostalgia. Wait for the beautiful epiphanies, even as time and space remain suspended in this alluring lyric imagination. One encounters a poetry that bravely looks at ideas of identity, border crossings, diaspora, heritage, tradition, community, family, and what it means to belong. Indeed, this is a welcome homecoming for the author, and what a grand tour of a life’s journeying it has been. Sublime. Remarkable. Simply magnificent.”
—Desmond Francis Xavier Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, Winner of the Singapore Literature Prize

“Shilpa’s poetry traces how shifting light, from "coppered dawn" to "a sundown mist [descending] on the ghats," illuminates the tender narrative of a family in transition. The play between natural radiance and urban gleam becomes an objective correlative for the immigrant clan’s own metamorphosis. Each poem distills the complex emotions of leaving and arriving, of roots seeking new soil while branches reach toward changed skies.”
—Eric Tinsay Valles, poet, editor and educator

“Shilpa’s is a voice that is at once intelligent and humane. Her work is dynamic and beautifully paced—a culturally rich and sensually stimulating experience that is, quite simply, a joy to read.”
—Kita Das, Ol James, The Letter Review

“Shilpa has beautifully meshed the world she grew up in and with the world she currently calls home. She draws parallels between her childhood by recalling memories of Little India and her Amma, and finds joy in how technology keeps the family together internationally. This collection of poems invites the reader into her world of duality, through her thoughtfully crafted words.”
—Latha, Writer

“Through richly evocative language and a keen eye for botanical metaphors, Shilpa embarks on a poignant exploration of movement and displacement, love and belonging, and the liminal spaces between migration and settlement. Buttressed by her transnational sensibilities, the personal and the universal entwine in her poetry, serving as a living, breathing testament to the intricate connections between place, identity, and the human experience. Like seeds that grow into mighty banyan trees, Shilpa’s poems weave a tapestry of interwoven perspectives, akin to a reticulated network of aerial roots—one which branches out into a forest of reflection and imagination that takes root in the reader’s mind.”
—Ow Yeong Wai Kit, Educator and Poet

“These poems are lush with images and symbols from the two countries/cultures Shilpa deftly inhabits, her original home in India and the new in Singapore where she now lives. The diction reflects this reality, the English enriched with untranslatable words from the mother country and allusions ( people, places, birds, trees etc), pointing to a restless, assimilative mind journeying to seek identities, roots, and loops in her rich past and present.

A cornucopia of poetry.”
—Robert Yeo, Poet and Playwright

“Aerial Roots is a heartfelt homage to memories of the poet’s time spent in India, her country of origin. Set under the metaphoric, awning leitmotif of the banyan tree, Thapliyal’s poems offer the reader a universe with hidden windows that open unto an “undergrowth of decades”. One unlocks new meanings every time one enters her work. The poems speak of dislocation, migration, identity or the loss of it, and of the untethered state of our being, while also being contained within exquisite, precise language. The poet has a remarkable ability to draw connections between the personal and the cosmic, the present and the past, longing and reality. Her work is tender, incisive, clear-sighted and deeply intimate, replete with “stains and spills of plump memories”. Her poetry stuns us, wounds us, keeps us warm, while being unapologetically her own. The poems display amazing manoeuvring of the terrain of the page and the mind - a gentle flow, akin to a river’s graceful swirl on its journey. The memories shared with us are mesmerising and quintessentially, culturally, charmingly Indian. Indeed her poems hold “…lamps to moonless skies”. The collection is a milestone written on the existential nuances of life. Every line, an “aperture for departure”.”
—Vinita Agrawal, Poet and Editor
Shilpa Dikshit Thapliyal is an Indian-Singaporean poet and author of two poetry collections. Her work has appeared in the Practice Research & Tangential Activities (PR&TA) Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The Best Asian Poetry, The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, Trivium, Little Things, to let the light in, Anima Methodi, and elsewhere.

Poems from her previous collection Between Sips of Masala Chai (Kitaab International, 2019) have been selected for secondary school curriculum in Singapore. Her poem, ‘Hymn of Hope’, written during the pandemic for the Homeward project, was performed by the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic Orchestra. Some of her poems have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, and Chinese Ink-Art.

Her poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize and awarded second place in The Letter Review Prize, 2022. Her third collection, Aerial Roots, was awarded The Letter Review Prize for Unpublished Books, 2024. She has read poetry at the Singapore Writers Festival, the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Mumbai, Poetry on the Move, Canberra, The RevTen Radio, USA, and the Festival of Friendship (Revolution of Tenderness, USA).

Shilpa has adjudicated several poetry competitions including the National Poetry Competition, the CLASS Poetry Competition, the National Poetry Recitation Competition, and the Write and Burn Spoken Word Competition. Shilpa serves on the organising committee of Poetry Festival Singapore as a poet and literary organiser.

Born and raised in India, Shilpa completed her Master’s in Computer Management (MCM) from Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Symbiosis University, Pune. She worked in a leading IT services company before relocating to Singapore in 2001. She has recently completed her second Master’s, M.A. (Arts) from the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Shilpa resides in Singapore with her family.

Authors

Aerial Roots: Loops Of Infinity And Other Poems