Diane Mehta

United States

Managing Editor at School Library Journal

Author and Writer at Freelance

Writer & Editor. Happier Far: Essays 2025, Tiny Extravaganzas 2023 (poems). Novel 1946 Bombay TK. New Yorker, Kenyon, VQR, A Public Space. Bombay-NYC.

Articles

Rehearsal Scenes

1 week ago | theparisreview.org | Diane Mehta

By Diane Mehta June 18, 2025 Three dispatches from the New Chamber Ballet’s poet in residence, Diane Mehta, who has observed their rehearsals nearly every week for the past year and a half. 1: The LiftIn the delicate center of the action, each dancer rests her head on the other woman’s shoulder. Expectation slows, tragedy softens, the center holds. They are barely touching. The lean is superficial; they do not need each other yet.
Rehearsal Scenes

1 week ago | buff.ly | Diane Mehta

By Diane Mehta June 18, 2025 Three dispatches from the New Chamber Ballet’s poet in residence, Diane Mehta, who has observed their rehearsals nearly every week for the past year and a half. 1: The LiftIn the delicate center of the action, each dancer rests her head on the other woman’s shoulder. Expectation slows, tragedy softens, the center holds. They are barely touching. The lean is superficial; they do not need each other yet.
'Not Heaven but Paradise' offers Catholic take on our geopolitical era

Mar 29, 2025 | ncronline.org | Diane Mehta |Michael Mewshaw

(Unsplash/Marco Montero Pisani) American damage is the story underneath the story in Michael Mewshaw's powerful literary thriller set in Granada, Spain. More than 20 books into his career, Mewshaw is deft at creating a story that is not as it appears yet is exactly as it appears. The rubbery life of a narrative relies on a sequence of perfectly normal scenes that promise to be entertaining, until the whole thing explodes and we are no longer laughing.
How Visions of Freediving Helped Diane Mehta Finish Her Novel

Mar 17, 2025 | lithub.com | Diane Mehta

When I feel most invisible, I turn to YouTube and watch videos of freediving. I became enthralled when I was researching the motions and rhythms of being proficiently underwater for a scene in my novel about my parents.
Her Greatest Hits

Feb 18, 2025 | longreads.com | Diane Mehta

Diane Mehta | Longreads | February 18, 2025 | 4,533 words (16 minutes)“Her Greatest Hits” is a piece excerpted from Happier Far: Essays by Diane Mehta, published by the University of Georgia Press and on sale March 15, 2025. My mother was no spendthrift, but her mind was rich.
“Backbend,” by Diane Mehta

Oct 28, 2024 | newyorker.com | Diane Mehta |“Forest with Castanets.”

Clever in the fold, you bendbackbend (uplift, clouds),bend again as if the spine,excited to perform,thinks without uncertaintythat it is dance itself. Uncertainly, we seegrace, fracas, memory—we are always seekinggood inversions, chieflybecause we know discomfortand want to conquer it. I wonder how it feelsinch by inch to find the floorand, forsaking safety, leave it. So much your body is meshedin flex and yet yields tougherthan softness suggests. But do you ever feel your bodyis a noose?
Tiny Extravaganzas

Feb 29, 2024 | harvardreview.org | Diane Mehta |Andrew Koenig

by Diane Mehtareviewed by Rhony Bhopla“What is love?” This age-old question is the main query of Diane Mehta’s Tiny Extravaganzas. In these eloquent poems, Mehta responds to this question, and to artworks, with a tempered euphoria. The final quatrain from “Pot-pourri À Vaisseau, From Sèvres,” for instance, reads more like the beginning of a poem than the ending:Art is love modeled in experiencefired at higher temperatures than experience.
Universal Concerns by Carlene Gadapee — BIRCH BARK EDITING

Jan 2, 2024 | birchbarkediting.com | Diane Mehta

Tiny ExtravaganzasBy Diane MehtaArrowsmith Press 2023113 pagesArt is love modeled in experiencefrom Diane Mehta’s “Pot-Pourri À Vaisseau, from Sèvres”Diane Mehta’s overall approach to her subject matter in Tiny Extravaganzas compels the reader to engage with her unique focus on language. Of particular interest is Mehta’s employment of invention and diction; she invites the reader to consider language and image in new ways.
7 Poetry Collections By Women Of Color That Shatter The American Sentence

Oct 27, 2023 | electricliterature.com | Patricia Jones |Diane Mehta

Skip to content Reading Lists Diane Mehta recommends poems that apply power through acoustics and rhythm while documenting harsh histories Since Walt Whitman, the American sentence has shape-shifted in and out of forms, from race-car lyrical lines that drive off the page, to fields of hailstorm words floating in white space in a way that resembles visual art, and back to semi-formal stanzas that lilt and groove around a pentameter-like beat. I’ve designed my poetry collection Tiny...
Low

Oct 25, 2023 | publishersweekly.com | Nick Flynn |Diane Seuss |Victoria Chang |Diane Mehta

Flynn’s bracing sixth collection (following I Will Destroy You) contains lyric poems and cinematic, fragmentary sequences that record the generative spaces of art, memory, and place: “The town is still dark, but there you are, as the light turns from lack to need to desire, as the wind takes the shape of you.” The title, which pays tribute to recently disbanded slow-core indie group Low, speaks to the volume’s interest in what is just below hearing.