Akif Kichloo

Falling Through Love by Akif Kichloo | Book Review

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Falling Through Love is a heart-pounding, stomach-dropping, beautiful plunge into experiences of love, longing, and loss.

Falling Through Love submerges readers into Kichloo’s deeply personal yet widely resonant experiences, exploring relationships in their most exposed and honest states. Written in a variety of poetic forms—free verse, rhyme, prose, and visual poetry—Falling Through Love takes the reader on a poignant journey with the writer, about charting one’s own path in life, investigating failure, family dynamics, and love. Looking at life backward and forward simultaneously, this collection brings forth new perspectives on what it means to be alive, to have made mistakes, to have fought for an identity, to have loved and lost and then loved and lost again.

Date Published: November 5, 2019

Date Read: November 7, 2019

Genre: Poetry

Number of Pages: 144 pages

Get your copy here: Amazon | Book Depository| Barnes and Noble

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Fearless, honest, evocative and personal.

Akif Kichloo has proven himself to be a new rising poet to definitely watch out for. I have the pleasure of reading his other work Poems That Lose which I thoroughly enjoyed as well, but Falling Through Love has got to be my favorite book by him. I have witnessed how much his poetry evolved from his very first book up to the latest one. He was more precise, yet never losing his signature charm.

There are few poems here that honestly made me tear up, especially the poem The Absence of Everything. I don’t know why, but it gave me goosebumps. The poem is about a stillborn child and how it somewhat affected the relationship of the parents. It spoke to me as if I have undergone the same ordeal, when in fact I didn’t. And that was what is commendable with this collection of poetry, it has the power to make you feel emotions beyond your own understanding.

Falling Through Love is such a powerful collection revolving around family, parent and child relationship, loss, longing, brokenness, love and the depths of it and so much more. It was coherent yet gave different textures, different flavours. It tackled topics with full of heart, you can notice how personal each of the poems were, yet one couldn’t help but resonate to it as if each poem is also about its reader no matter how different their situation might be. It was personal yet inclusive. It touches you like every good poetry should. It wasn’t a detached piece of writing, it was inviting, with shared joy and even shared grief. A collection like this is hard to come by these days.

Akif Kichloo is now added to my favorite poets list. His work is truly something to watch out for. Lyrical yet concise. Honest and evocative. Fearless and passionate. A book worthy of your precious time.

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there is this tender place
between nothing & everything

now that’s where I see myself;

someone’s something
in the everything of their world.

— Falling Through Love, Akif Kichloo

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Poems That Lose by Akif Kichloo | Book Review

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Synopsis from Goodreads: From Akif Kichloo,  author of The Feeling May Remain comes this deeply personal and poetic account of a troubled life. A nowhere man, with or without god, a quintessential mental nomad, omnipresent in his mistakes, exploring mental illness, identity, family, sexuality, god, love, childhood, and purpose of life, Poems That Lose brings forth questions all of us wrestle with but either avoid asking ourselves or miserably fail answering almost every time. Kichloo navigates brilliantly from the deeply personal to the universal to the extinct, paving the way for a rare new voice in contemporary poetry, a poet who is more than wanted; he is desperately needed. These poems will slip off your tongue, creep under your skin, and live there.

Date Published: September 27, 2017

Genre: Poetry

Publisher: Read Out Loud Publishing

Date Read: December 2017

No. of Pages: 104

Source: Provided by the author in exchange for an honest review.

Grab a copy here: Amazon

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Poems That Lose tackles different facets of life from the point of view of its author, laying things raw and vulnerable. And though the reader and the author had nothing in common, the poems unite both into universal commonality, into that shared understanding of how life was, is and what it is ought to be. The poems were an effective means to send the message it was trying to convey. What I admire most about this collection of poetry is how it did not sugarcoat things, how it was able to present reality not dressed in fancy clothes but reality in its truest and most vulnerable state.

I loved how most of it was a poem about or directed to a father, how relationship differ and how it affected every decision, every characteristic and every perspective may it be towards life, love and other equally important matters. I also commend how this collection was a perfect place to start for new poetry lovers. It was digestible and relatable without losing the personal touch of the author. This poetry book is something you savor, something you don’t rush into, for its beauty comes from the readers appreciation of how each poem presented a figment of their own reality reflecting the written words and the messages conveyed.

The book was saying everything you wish you were able to enunciate yourself. It was this connection that despite having experienced life in an entirely different circumstance the book was able to resonate to you in a level of understanding you didn’t know possible. The book presented life in an entirely different light that you wouldn’t have considered looking at it in that perspective. It was more of life’s affirmation through the eyes of another and along the process you realize that no matter where life’s tribulations lead us, we go back to being human and accepting it with grace because that is how life is ought to be lived.

Dumbbells in a gym never made a man.

Learning to shoot guns never made a man.

Staring contests with friends, undressing

Women on the streets never made a man.

There can be no peace in this world until we

teach men to hold books as preciously as they

are taught to hold back their tears.

Mothers, allow your sons to cry.

Fathers, ask your sons to lower their gaze.

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Loving Yourself Doesn’t Mean Hating Someone Else by Akif Kichloo |Poem No. 15 (NPM2017)

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Loving Yourself Doesn’t Mean Hating Someone Else

by Akif Kichloo

Loving yourself doesn’t mean

hating someone else.

Hating someone else doesn’t mean

you’re loving yourself.

I know it gets confusing,

I know that some situations call for

desperate measures,

but short term solutions need not

inspire long term plans.

Please understand,

A teacher full of judgment will

inspire students filled with 

contempt,

And if you need to house

contempt in your heart for to

put yourself first,

re-evaluate your stance,

distance yourself from your teacher,

and most of all,

take a step back,

close your eyes,

pause the madness,

breathe, empty your thoughts,

there is always a tomorrow

to start afresh.

Just like shoving sugar down

someone’s throat

won’t make them a sweet person,

A love gone sour can still taste good,

and you don’t have to punish

anyone for this.

Including yourself.

All the healing is in the forgiveness,

but you have to forgive yourself first

before you can forgive anyone else.

And forgiveness, though tricky,

with time, it comes.

–

You can get Akif Kichloo’s latest poetry book The Feeling May Remain here, Amazon and Book Depository

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