Issue 25. July, 2026

At the end of May, poets and poetry lovers gathered at Audreys Books for the launch of Saraswoti Lamichhane's new poetry collection, Karaikhola Flows. Introducing Sara was writer and editor Peter Midgley, and he delivered a moving tribute to the exceptional breadth and resilience of Sara's work. In his words, Peter beautifully traced the shifts in Sara's poetry—from the vivid innocence of a childhood shadowed by war in Nepal and the heartbreaking realities of the global sex trade, to the tender memories of her father, Buwa, and the quiet weariness of the immigrant experience.

Sara's experiences and path are unique, but her exploration of uprooting, survival, and the vital power of women reclaiming their voices through language is something poets and poetry lovers will connect with, and so we wanted to share Peter's introduction with our readers. Thank you, Peter!

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By Peter Midgley

Writer and Editor

Saraswoti Lamichhane and I met through poetry, and it is through poetry that we continue to be friends. For more than a decade, she has been a constant presence at reading series in Edmonton and surrounding communities—there is such a glorious abundance of poetry in Edmonton right now. In this decade and a bit, I have come to know Sara as a person who gives generously, warmly, and whose enthusiasm for learning and the writing world knows few bounds. And it is through writing, books, that we are able to share her world.

Idylls, myths, and lurking dangers

The innocence of the early poems in Karaikhola Flows, the oneness with nature, reminded me a bit of Kasiya Makaka Phiri’s short story “Bumbinkomo,” which appeared in a slim volume called The Old Man of the Waterfalls and Other Stories (1990). Little Bumbinkomo tends the cattle in his mountain village, unaware of the approaching war. Throughout the short story, there is always an awareness of war and other threats, yet what guides the story is the idyll of Bumbinkomo’s youth. And so it is in Sara’s poems: There are dangers lurking everywhere. The child soldier beneath the tree in which she sits; the lurking tiger in the forest. In knowledge of a lurking tiger, or in the threat of being discovered by a child soldier, we see not just danger, but also Sara's strength, and the strength that resonates through her poems. That ever-present threat is also why she invokes, quite early, the Goddess of Death, Kali, who haunts the poems in many guises. Kali’s presence is important, for Sara’s poems are not only rooted in the world she shares with other living beings, including forests, but in the mythologies of Nepal.

The idyll of Sara’s world is shattered by war, just like Bumbinkomo’s is, but unlike Bumbinkomo who “in the fullness of time would not know where he came from,” Sara does remember, and tells us in these poems that are so rooted in the places she calls home.

Ephemeral rivers of the diaspora

When she talks of ephemeral rivers that flow only seasonally and for the rest of the year hide their “secrets under the surface,” I am taken again to the ephemeral waters of my own birthplace, Namibia, and to the world of those of us who live in diaspora, whether willingly or as exiles. In these places away from home, we become ephemeral rivers, sharing our secrets only as the seasons or occasions demand.

Power, truth, and navigating loss

What emerges in Karaikhola Flows is a strong woman, a woman who knows “A girl doesn’t go to school just for herself.” Sara speaks of the significance of words, of writing, especially for women. There is power in seeing an old woman learn to write her name for the first time, yet it is a power we know is framed by the knowledge that about 40,000 Nepali girls are sold into the sex trade every year.

A figure who appears repeatedly in the poems is Buwa, her father. We meet Buwa in silence, in love, and it is often through Buwa that we navigate loss and absence. He also holds the answer, for Sara, to an eternal question: What, and where, is home?

Finding a forest for the soul

“I’m weary of rooting in a place forever” she writes of leaving Nepal and finding new adventures. The poem from which this line is taken, “Growing out of a Suitcase,” encapsulates so much of the immigrant/refugee experience: people who have to make themselves over out of the suitcases that hold their belongings. But where others might wither in that experience, Sara flourishes and embraces adventure through the hardships.

As humans, we root, uproot, become restless, re-root (and re-route). In so many of the poems, we sense, as Sara puts it, how the “soul needs a forest.” In Karaikhola Flows, Earth and Water are animate, they are part of the poet’s soul. it is not perchance that Sara titles one of her poems, “Sibling Trees.” What emerges in Sara's poetry as she searches for a forest for her soul, is a rootedness in the world around her so that regardless of where she finds herself physically, she is rooted in the water we all share, in the forests that guide us no matter where we are.

Poems shift, grow, and re-root

After the idyll of youth, there are several shifts in the poems, in the collection: war, emigration, motherhood. The collection is constantly on the move, finding roots and rootedness in new places. All these experiences are filtered through the things that matter for life: water and trees and earth.

In so many of the poems, we become aware of the importance of silence. Not the stillness that resists and does not reveal its secrets, but the kind that signifies love and connection. In “Breathing of Buried Bones,” Sara writes about the “breathing of bones in my backyard”—and that, ultimately, is what she does as a poet: excavate the bones of the past.

Find Peter Midgley online.
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Here's Saraswoti Lamichhane's website. You can order her new collection Karaikhola Flows from Mawenzi House and all good bookstores.