Arundhathi Subramaniam
Devotion · Love
Arundhathi Subramaniam
An Indian poet whose writing lets spiritual inquiry remain close to embodied, everyday life.
Contemporary · Indian poet, author, editor, and curator
Their literary world
Arundhathi Subramaniam writes between contemporary poetry, spiritual inquiry, and Indian cultural traditions. Her work explores sacred and ordinary life, personal longing and philosophical curiosity, inherited myth and individual experience.
She brings mythology and devotional inheritances into conversation with the contradictions of modern life, often resisting fixed conclusions. In Love Without a Story, intimacy, friendship, mythic quests, and the everyday meet; the poems make room for the sacred without separating it from the human.
Featured reading · Flute & Forge reading companion
Love Without a Story
A reading companion to Subramaniam’s collection, where love can include passion and friendship, mythic searching and modern longing, speech and silence.
The collection’s title unsettles the expectation that love must arrive as a grand story with a clear ending. These poems make room for friendship, desire, spiritual searching and silence. The companion follows the collection’s many registers; the publisher’s page provides the book details and a route to the work.
This is a Flute & Forge companion to the collection, not a poem by Subramaniam.
Explore the collection at Bloodaxe BooksA passage
“Still best to meet in poems.”I Grew Up in an Age of Poets · from Love Without a Story (2020)
A way into the passage
The poem contrasts literary performance with the uncertain, lively work of making poems. Its closing thought treats poetry as a genuine form of encounter, where conversation can remain open and meanings need not be settled.
Essential works
Poetry collection · 2019/2020 editions
Love Without a Story
Poems on intimacy, friendship, myth, spirituality, and the points where ordinary life meets transcendence.
Poetry collection · 2014
When God Is a Traveller
A collection of journeys, devotion, identity, and unexpected encounters with the sacred.
Poetry collection · 2025
The Gallery of Upside Down Women
A recent collection extending Subramaniam’s explorations of women, identity, and imaginative possibility.
A question worth exploring
Can the sacred be encountered in ordinary life without separating spirituality from human experience?
A question to carry with you
Can spiritual curiosity remain intimate with everyday life?
An editorial introduction by Flute & Forge Studio.