Decipher the Smoke

In her debut chapbook of poetry, Decipher the Smoke, Nora Gupta "scratch[es] through the pretty pink, the hot pink, the girly-girl pink universe" to reveal the true, indiscernible colors of girlhood. The browned bulb of childhood. The way bodies slither under white LED gas station lights into self-discovery. Through these poems, Gupta asks her reader to reckon with—and perhaps even decipher—the thinning line between girlhood and grief, one often stepped right over without second thought. In...