Jayant Kashyap: Poetry

‘The White Trees’ was commended in the  tree poetry challenge  on The (UK) Poetry Society’s  Young Poets Network  (YPN) in 2019. It was later animated by Rohit Gurumith Singh, and is available on YouTube here .

‘Visits after dark’ is a sequence of three shorter poems building upon a rather old (incomplete) draft, which I expanded particularly to send to the Crow & Cross Keys . I’d first learned about the magazine following publication of some of Amy Wolstenholme’s poems in 2021, and ‘Visits after dark’ appeared in March 2025.

‘The Earth as a Woman Passively Smoking’ was published as part of the Australian Plumwood Mountain Journal ’s “ The Transformative Now ” issue in June 2023. The poem has an epigraph from Daniel Clark’s ‘ Sixteen Haiku ’, and in the introduction to the issue, guest editor Kristen Lang praised Kashyap’s work for having the capability to become a “part of the tapestry of a given time.”

‘My Mother Gives a Conservation Speech’ first appeared in The Ilanot Review in 2023 .

‘Burning the Stamps’ dates back to 2018, if not further, which was when I was new to publishing poetry, and very affected by the very brilliant Agha Shahid Ali ’s work (hence the mention here). At least sever years after having written the first draft of the poem, it appeared in the US-based Collateral in November 2025 as ‘On Burning the Stamps’.

‘Pyre’ first appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine ’s 54th issue, in April 2023 , and was praised for “an immersive experience.” It later appeared, in a slightly different form, in Kashyap’s New Poets Prize-winning third pamphlet Notes on Burials (smith|doorstop, 2025). The poem has Meg Dunley’s post from X (formerly Twitter) as epigraph: “ Do birds always fly with purpose or also just for fun[...

‘A Positively Violent Poem in Five Parts’ won the second prize in the  Poems to Solve the Climate Crisis challenge  on  Young Poets Network  in 2021. This challenge was created in partnership with  People Need Nature , and set and judged by poet  Louisa Adjoa Parker . It was later presented at COP26, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Glasgow , and featured as the UK Department...

‘On milelong walks to look at closed windows every once in a while’ was published by Chismosa Press as part of their Volume 2 in 2019.

‘Earth, Fire’, written after Yvonne Reddick ’s poem ‘ Translating Mountains from the Gaelic ’, was the first prize-winner in the Young Poets Competition at the Wells Festival of Literature in 2021 . The competition was judged by the poet Phoebe Stuckes.

‘every other side of my town’ was part of PoetryM’app , Label Lit’s Irish  National Poetry Day  project in 2019.

‘’Twas a long summer of thin air’ first appeared in Ink Sweat & Tears , where it was the IST Pick of the Month for May 2021 .

‘Annotations on Microbes’ first appeared in ‘ Biophilia ’ ( The Winged Moon , 2025).

‘Come over, this night—’ was published in Rappahannock Review ’s Issue 12.2: Spring 2025. It borrows from Faheem Abdullah and Rauhan Malik’s popular song ‘ Ishq ’.

‘Warm Verbs’ was first published as part of Full House Literary ’s Summer 2023 issue.