“What we carry is not always chosen.
What we remember is not always complete.
Between breath and memory, a life takes shape.”
Some poetry collections feel like performances. This one feels like a quiet room you enter and sit in for a while.
Between Breath and Memory is built almost entirely out of memory—family stories, migration, childhood scenes, and the slow afterlife of grief. The poems move gently between continents and generations, holding small details with a kind of patience that feels rare in contemporary poetry.
One of the strongest threads through the collection is the presence of the father, whose life and absence shape many of the poems. In the opening pieces, memory becomes something almost physical—something carried across distance and time. In one striking passage the speaker returns to the land where her father’s ashes were placed, gathering petals from the guava tree planted above him and pressing them into a book so that “some small, fragrant portion of him might keep living between the pages, where time itself cannot refuse the act of holding on.”
That sense of holding on—to objects, stories, gestures—runs through the entire book.
The author often builds poems around ordinary things: a wooden chest, a sofa chosen for a dowry, a grain barrel filled with childhood toys. But these objects slowly open into larger histories of migration, family inheritance, and survival. In “The Blue Pine Chest,” for example, a simple household object becomes a container for decades of life, until time finally claims it “peg by peg, what had once been made to hold everything.”
Many of the poems move between the past and the present with a quiet steadiness. A father traveling to school on a camel in Southern Punjab, a grandmother teaching herself languages, children drawing imaginary jungles on summer afternoons. These moments accumulate gradually until the reader begins to see the larger tapestry of a family story unfolding.
Brar’s voice is intimate, thoughtful, and quietly unforgettable. What makes the book especially moving is how it balances grief with gratitude. Even when confronting loss, the poems rarely collapse into despair. Instead they search for ways memory continues to live in gestures, landscapes, and inherited habits.
By the closing poems, the voice has softened into something almost reconciled with loss. In one of the final pieces the speaker writes that the tears have gentled and that the one who has gone now returns only occasionally in dreams—until the living and the dead seem to forgive each other: “you have forgiven my living, and I have forgiven your leaving.”
What remains after reading Between Breath and Memory is the sense of having walked slowly through someone’s history—one shaped by family, migration, devotion, and the fragile persistence of love. It’s the kind of collection that values patience over spectacle, trusting that the smallest memories often carry the deepest weight.
And in the end, that quiet accumulation of moments becomes the book’s real strength: a reminder that the stories we inherit, and the ones we choose to keep telling, are what finally give shape to a life.
A graceful meditation on family, distance, and loss, this collection reads like a lyrical memoir written in fragments of light.
Pub date April 19, 2026
ISBN 978-1-7751580-5-9
Print length 140 pages
Price $26.99 (USD) Hardcover, $19.99 Paperback, $3.99 Kindle edition