Yak Dilemma

Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal was born in the Himalayan town of Palampur, India. She studied at St. Bede’s College, Shimla; Trinity College, Dublin; and Queen’s University, Belfast. Her poems have been translated into Arabic, German and Italian, and have recently appeared in Ambit, Banshee, Gutter, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Jukebox, Poetry London, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Irish Times, The Lonely Crowd, The Pickled Body, The Tangerine and elsewhere. In 2018, she was one of the twelve poets selected for Poetry Ireland’s ‘Introductions’ series. She is the 2021 Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent. The Yak Dilemma is her first full-length collection.

'Tender, innovative and potent, with a razor sharp intelligence, these poems travel the world, and the heart, with fierce beauty. Dhaliwal is an important and vibrantly exciting new voice in poetry.' -Rebecca Tamas; 'Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal is an assured and musical poet. In The Yak Dilemma, the natural world turns through lyrics of brief encounter. Language, like a bird, alights and then departs, leaving behind an impression of change, held momentarily, and then set free. These are songs of belonging and of movement, of fluid identity, carefully crafted and always graceful. Like a global flaneuse, Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal writes poems that offer hope, 'a daisy chain of ampersands / on no man's land.' -Sean Hewitt; 'This collection is a treat for the soul, taking readers on a journey across time and borders. Dhaliwal's writing is evocative, thrilling, and magnificent.' -Zeba Talkhani; 'The Yak Dilemma charts a masterful fugue of exile, longing and belonging. Dhaliwal writes with a rich fluency of tongues, evoking pathos and pleasure in equal measure. Upending perception, these poems become a way of looking by which we start to see through our hands. A marvellous work.' -Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe; 'This deeply satisfying collection is bathed in wit and colour, and skilfully interweaves personal, literary and socio-political events. Kaur Dhaliwal travels through time and space and the self; I wanted to go wherever she was heading.' -Jen Calleja; 'A heartfelt, entertaining debut which sees the author explore Europe and the Middle East like an intrepid flaneuse, reminding us how the impulse to walk around our world's cities allows the best poets to turn one's private life into a constantly shifting terrain for exploration.' -Andre Naffis-Sahely; 'The Yak Dilemma is beautiful, transportative and so deeply felt. Surpiya Kaur Dhaliwal takes us on a powerful and tender poetic journey through liminal spaces and places, asking what it means to feel at home in the world and at home in your mind.' -Lucia Osborne-Crowley; ‘The Yak Dilemma asks: why risk myopia, when we can move forward—and unfold?’ -Poetry London; ‘a collection which inspires a complex mix of pathos, longing, curiosity and joy.’ -Idler; ‘an illuminating exercise about the self and our surroundings’ -Nidhi Verma, Platform; 'Her work is quick, interrogative and moves deceptively easily from city to city and subject to subject, but never do we lose sight of the questions Dhaliwal asks, “Where have I truly come to?” -Poetry Book Society