Yellow Flower Gills Me Whole: Poems

by Sid Ghosh

Overview

An exciting new edition/entry to Milkweed's Multiverse series—a visionary collection of poetry advocating for the excited, the rebellious, and the neuroqueer. 

In this momentous debut, Sid Ghosh invites the reader “to be so free that it scares you.” Leveraging gem-like koans, technicolor wordplay, and earth-shaking wit, he creates startling new worlds in only a handful of words. As a nonspeaking autistic writer with Down syndrome who must navigate immense sensorimotor complexity, his short poems are both muscular and agile, displaying a dexterity replete with vertiginous grace: “Spinning I harness / poetry of the Earth. // The Sufi dances / in me to dare me // to scare your loud / soul to ensnare // my fearful mind to / bare some misery / to bear some truth.”

Ghosh writes beyond his years and from a perspective steeped in queer and fractaled sensibilities. As one who is “simply privy to a new road,” he renders neurodiverse thought patterns as truly divine. The poems that result bristle with wisdom, divergence, and the “generosity of deep rivers.” Unprecedented in its genius and composition, this collection of poems is sure to leave readers wide-eyed and breathless.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639551200
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	08/19/2025
Series:	Multiverse
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Sid Ghosh is a levitator of language, meandering through the rivers of Down Syndrome, gilling himself through poetry. He is the author of two chapbooks: Give a Book and Proceedings of the Full Moon Rotary Club. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Table of Contents

Praise for Sid Ghosh

“In Ghosh’s poem, I hear an abolitionist call to find the sacred relation and joy of mystery in the making kindred of fractals, as form and process, as infinitely intricate ecologies, as crip liberation calling us to abolish the police in our society and the police in ourselves.”—heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

Editorial Reviews

There’s little in contemporary poetry quite like Sid Ghosh’s minimalist gizmos. Silly, surreal, and sacred all at once.”—Christopher Spaide, Literary Hub

“Some poems make you stop in your tracks, but Ghosh’s spiritually charged epigrammatic poems will set you spinning through your own being. Yellow Flower Gills Me Whole holds up a shocking compact mirror to the mind, which reflects the universal crisis of aliveness, while turning you inside out with the quickness of a Celan lyric or a Dickinson dash. Read these poems in a dim room and they will light it up like a ‘haul of stars.’ No, they will light you up—prepare to haunt the life you know.”—Elizabeth Metzger, author of Lying In

“Sid Ghosh’s Yellow Flower Gills Me Whole meanders metaphysics and language into the philosophical depths of neuroqueer galaxies. These aphoristic poems invite us to spin toward a politics and poetics of freedom-making by way of ‘kindred fractals,’ a ‘giving of hearts,’ and ‘infinite / maiden / wormholes.’ In a world where ‘man has made / kindred police,’ Ghosh’s writing divines other possibilities through a sparkling kinship of madnesses. With them, I am gilled.”—heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, author of The Inheritance of Haunting

“In Yellow Flower Gills Me Whole, poems function as tremulous amulets crushed before our eyes and relieved of their essence. Our language is offered the eerie ability to laugh at itself and always within a series of well-appointed trap doors. A charming syllabic intelligence is repeatedly on display here, 'To think mind is hot / is to hammer bones with air.' Rarely does a collection so clearly reveal the musicality of a poet’s thinking, the quick elision and adornment, all the bonfires that spring up through instinct. Ghosh is a great stylist, meaning his deft tone of voice seems to morph at will. He is kindly cutting brush from our crowded trail and dousing it with selective light.”—Cedar Sigo, author of Guard the Mysteries

From the Publisher