Review: The Last Time I Saw You by Akhil Katyal

In April 1947, while speaking to a creative writing class at the University of Mississippi, American novelist William Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, described his contemporary Ernest Hemingway in these words: “He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used.” Reputed for his combativeness, Hemingway, who loved boxing and also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, responded a few months later: “Poor Faulkner. No reader of Akhil Katyal’s new book of poems, The Last Time I Saw You, will probably run to the dictionary — but they will pause often, provoked into feeling big emotions by his consummate craft. Nineteenth-century British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously described poetic technique as “the best words in the best order”, and Katyal demonstrates a deep self-reflexivity with words. For instance, in the poem Eunice De Souza Hears My Agonies, the narrator complains to De Souza, celebrated Indian poet and critic, about the end of a relationship: “He has gone, / I complain.” The poem weaves in a thought about the nature of love and mortality: “At thirty-five, / one asks for certainties, / right?” But De Souza’s response reminds one of her legendary wit: “one prefers / a good bowel movement / over love”.