Praise for Useful Information for the Soon-to-be Beheaded

“The marvelous prose poems in Shivani Mehta’s debut collection live at the intersection of language and imagery. Even if you won’t be losing your head anytime soon, Useful Information for the Soon-to-be Beheaded should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in spending some time with a wild imagination set to beautiful use.” 

—Rick Bursky, author of Death Obscura  

“Shivani Mehta’s Useful Information for the Soon-to-Be Beheaded is full of useful information on how to write a prose poem. Mehta strikes a perfect pitch between memory and magic. These are separate poems in the fabulist tradition, but the book also has interwoven threads that form a tale or a novel in prose poems. Her opening sentences are doors that open on surprise. Her last sentences spring open and shut like a trapdoor beneath your feet, and you find yourself falling, falling and pleasingly confounded.” 

—Richard Garcia, author of Chickenhead: Prose Poems

About the Author

Shivani Mehta was born in Mumbai and raised in Singapore. She moved to New York to attend Hamilton College and then earned a Juris Doctor from Syracuse University College of Law. Her prose poems have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Coachella Review, Cold Mountain Review, Fjord’s Review, Hotel Amerika, The Prose Poem Project, The Normal School, Used Furniture Review, Generations Literary Journal, Midwest Quarterly Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Shivani is the accomplished mother of toddler twins. Incredibly, they sleep long enough to allow her to write prose poems. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, children, dog, two cats, and several fish.