“In a time when memory is in short supply, Diane Mehta is the poet to remind us where the muses came from and what they mean to show us.”
Tiny Extravaganzas
by Diane Mehta
Tiny Extravaganzas, Diane Mehta’s fiercely lyrical new collection, works the American sentence to its limits. Mehta’s poems are miniaturist examinations of art, aging, literature, grief, parenting, the sublime, labor, and faith. She chases rhythm, rhymes with wit, and upends formal verse with phrasing that moves like jazz against and within tradition. Art is both anchor and a framework for understanding the world, and each poem is an opportunity to have a conversation with the reader and with art and other artists. Her poems vary from small, contemplative musical interludes to epic poems about collective suffering. Mehta’s refined and propulsive poems come with an emotional bang that quietly breaks your heart.
“Dynamic diction is the pulsing heart of Mehta’s excellent second book. Eschewing traditional narrative structures, she opts to create soundscapes that reflect and reinterpret events through a fragmented syntax: ‘Flingabout night swung in with dead leaves and young bats/ screeching. Acrobatic papers, phonemes scatting.’ Mehta’s approach to rhythm and rhyme upends traditional verse forms with phrasing that moves like jazz, both against and within established poetic traditions.” Starred review in Publishers Weekly
Diane Mehta
Diane Mehta was born in Frankfurt, grew up in Bombay and New Jersey, studied in Boston, and now makes her home in New York City. She is the author of the essay collection Happier Far: Essays (University of Georgia Press, 2025), Forest with Castanets (Four Way, 2019), and a poetics guide, How to Write Poetry (Barnes & Noble, 2005). Her work has been recognized by the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, the Peter Heinegg Literary Award, and fellowships at Civitella Ranieri and Yaddo. She was the founding managing editor of A Public Space, launched and edited Glossolalia for PEN America to publish writing from underrepresented languages, and was executive nonfiction editor for Guernica. She is engaged in a lifelong project of reading Dante’s Commedia on a loop with a cellist-composer and porcelain artist, and collaborating with musicians to invent a new way of working through sound together. Projects with a photographer and a visual artist are underway. She is poet in residence with the New Chamber Ballet in New York City.
“In meditations on ‘fortunate times / and quicksand feelings,’ Mehta, a poet in New York City, induces a staccato rhythm of poetic effusion, darting from insight to insight, with the graceful and erratic comportment of one ‘wandering by accident or design / a way to find your tongue.’ She probes the ‘curve and scaw of personality’ through lively stylistic devices, like Hopkinsian neologism (‘frazzle-heather,’ ‘spirit-drunk’), that reflect her vision of consciousness as ‘the smack of happening into.’” David Woo, LitHub
“Language that shimmers and reinvents, words that challenge and direct the reader’s attention, lush settings and private musings—these are all foundational components in Diane Mehta’s work, Tiny Extravaganzas. One must finally argue: they are not tiny, they are the world made tangible, cracked open, reimagined, dusted and shined for us to experience as well.” Carlene Guadapee, MicroLit
“The collection changes key signatures like a startling symphony—each moment is a musical movement. Each is tuned to a fresh image like a different instrument. The result: a rich lyrical soundscape that shifts tempo and tone with the turn of every page.” Jonathan Everitt, Tupelo Quarterly
