You Spoke Prose, I Heard Poetry is a duet of forms and feelings: micro stories by Reena Kapoor, poems by Kate Adams, and evocative photo-art that together create a world within every chapter. Each section pairs a 100-word narrative with a sonnet or lyric response, inviting a call-and-answer between lived detail and inner music, observation and revelation, image and echo. The result is not a mirror but a conversation-prose speaking plainly, poetry listening deeply-so that silence, too, acquires texture and meaning.
These chapters move across villages and cities, kitchens and courtrooms, trains and rooftops, threading intimate lives through the larger fabric of custom and change: a widow who turns away professional mourners to steady her stunned child, a father who confronts violence with the harder labor of language, a prank call that becomes a lifeline, a hidden letter that keeps time with grief, girls who outgrow the limits designed for them, and mango debts paid back with present grace. The book engages questions of care, choice, and consequence-how generosity returns "tenfold," how daily commitment remarries love, how kindness can be a margin note that re-writes a life.
Designed to be savored slowly, this collection asks readers to pause-one or two chapters at a sitting-reading aloud when possible, letting image and cadence accumulate. Constraint becomes clarity: exactly one hundred words sharpen a scene to essentials, while sonnets expand its resonance, turning a moment into a chord that lingers. Read in sequence or opened at random, each pairing stands complete, yet speaks to the others, building a lattice of surprise, contemplation, and recognition with every turn of the page.
At heart, this is a meeting place: East and West in conversation, story and poem in counterpoint, memory and imagination in balance. It is an experiment in form that feels, above all, personal-an invitation to listen for what lives between lines, to watch how a photograph deepens a feeling, and to discover how brief encounters can hold entire worlds.
Stories by Reena Kapoor. Poems by Kate Adams. A harmonious whole-where prose observes, poetry reveals, and readers are welcomed to dwell in the spaces between.
