About the author
Rithvik Singh has already published five books. He has covered poetry, non-fiction, and fiction. He holds a degree in English Literature from Hansraj College, Delhi. Rithvik has over 6, 20,000 readers on Instagram. His handle is @wordsofrithvik. His latest book, ‘Did you ever love me?’, is already a national bestseller.
About the book
The cover is so pretty, and the edges of the book are also printed. Beautiful white flowers and butterflies adorn the edges. The illustrations/line drawings inside the book are also classy. The author has dedicated the book to his mother. He has written about love, loss, heartbreak, family, home, colonialism, dysfunctional relationships, his grandparents, and stories of people. Part-poetry and part-musings, the book includes a few autobiographical elements, making it a part-memoir. Rithvik often weaves in metaphors and similes in his poems. He writes about people being poems. He references Virginia Woolf in one piece, and his work is also feminist. His poem about how he feels when people tell him they wrote like Rithvik using AI, on page 186, is one of his most raw and confessional pieces.
Some of the lines from the book that stood out to me were:
“You feel this homesickness in your soul
for someone who didn’t ever look back
after leaving you alone.
You stay forgotten
like garlands floating in the Ganga
After a long day in Banaras.”
“God flips through
our Polaroids in the sky
As I walk past your street
bougainvillaeas rain on me
For a moment
we are not strangers anymore
We are back home.”
“It hasn’t stopped raining
since you left.
I’ve been folding my poems
into paper boats
and sending them to you
The rain reads them all
but you never do. “
Pic enhanced with AI
The edges of the book.
I thank Penguin Random House for the review copy
