Wild Embers by Nikita Gill

by Ravmeet kaur Oberoi · Published August 18, 2020 · Updated August 18, 2020

Wild Embers by Nikita Gill was first published in 2017.

Blurb:

WILD EMBERS explores the fire that lies within every soul, weaving words around ideas of feeling at home in your own skin, allowing yourself to heal and learning to embrace your uniqueness with love from the universe.

Featuring rewritten fairy-tale heroines, goddess wisdom and poetry that burns with revolution, this collection is an explosion of femininity, empowerment and personal growth.

My Favourite Wild Embers Quotes:

“…you cannot burn away what has always been aflame.”
“…you are still here turning all your pain, all your suffering into armour, into determination, into weapons and earning the respect of the same pack of wolves that were meant to rip you limb from limb. “
“Some days, I am both wolf and woman and I am still learning how to apologise for my wild.”
“You are a myth born to the wrong age. You are the kind of book that has magical stories trapped in every single page.”
“You awaken every dragon, every wolf, every monster that sleeps inside you and you remind them what hell looks like when it wears the skin of a gentle human.”

My Take:

Wild Embers by Nikita Gill brings to life raw emotions of self-discovery, assertion, perseverance and womanhood. It encompasses within it poetry for those who are searching for their meaning and those who understand too much. It is for those who are just beginning their adventure and those who are looking to start over. The author borrows from the past and the present to weave narratives that break the barriers of patriarchy across time.

While I enjoyed the collection completely, the reimagined tales of Greek Goddesses and fairy tale characters have to be my absolute favourite parts of Wild Embers. The author, Nikita Gill takes tales that have been spun around women and about women but not by women and changes the lense of perspective. Her reimagined tales portray the women in the tales as the protagonist. They are not characters that the story happens to. They embrace themselves, take control of their own narrative and emerge victoriously. I suppose that is what the message behind the reimagination is. We need to take control of our narratives instead of waiting for our stories to find us. We need to find our adventures.

Wild Embers has the kind of poetry I want to read out loud. Not just to myself but to all the women around me. Some of the poems in the collection stayed with me for a long time after I read it. It took me a while to be able to articulate my thoughts on this one, mostly because reading poetry for me has always been a process of introspection and this collection does a particularly profound job in aiding the process. It is a must-read!

Thank you for reading the review!