empirical by Gita Ralleigh [PRE-ORDER]

Description

This product is a pre-order. It publishes 28th March 2026. 

 

In jewelled and cutting language, Ralleigh summons up the 1943 Bengal Famine, ghosts, ayahs, mothers, bridal marigolds, peacocks, rot. The history of the subcontinent under Empire – which is also Britain’s history – is laid out in rich and rousing poetical forms. These are beautiful , heartbreaking poems abut the catastrophe (for many of us) that the British Empire wreaked, and its legacy.

—Anita Pati, author of Hiding to Nothing

“A gorgeous book; there are so many moments of transcendence in Empirical, a collection which sets ‘the blood singing.’”

—Mona Arshi, author of Mouth

“Juxtaposing ‘Empire’ with ‘Empirical’ the crystalline poems in Gita Ralleigh’s Empirical navigate the space between two forces: the ubiquitous yet invisible power of empire, and the empirical universe of memory—a “lost homeland,” a “ghost song”—that has faded into invisibility across space and time.”

—Cynthia Cruz, author of Hotel Oblivion

 

Empirical by Gita Ralleigh explores immigrant life, domesticity and motherhood through a series of lyric poems and narrative fragments, including several ghazals. From Black Star, a voicing of the earliest South Asians in Britain, to abecedarian for maternity ward, postcolonial estrangement, immigrant contingency and tentative instances of love, joy and belonging are illuminated. These poems trace how inherited myths, contested histories and political tides pattern our lives, leaving indelible marks which corral the course of future imaginaries for ourselves and our descendents.

Gita Ralleigh is a poet, writer and ex-doctor, born to immigrant parents in London. Her poems have been published by The Rialto and Magma Poetry among others, her books are A Terrible Thing (Bad Betty Press, 2020) and Siren (Broken Sleep Books 2022). She is a member of the Kinara poetry collective and teaches creative writing to under-graduate scientists at Imperial College as well as facilitating poetry workshops in the community.

Pamphlet, staplebound, 32 pages. ISBN 978-1-7395051-8-9