The Secret in my Blood | Akanksha Agarwal | Book Review

The Secret in my Blood by Akanksha Agarwal is a collection of poems focusing on the theme of love. It comprises lovely words and captivating illustrations to bring out the stages of love. Right from its inception to its development into a story that culminates in either togetherness or falling apart, the author describes everything in a novel way.

This collection is of moderate length divided into three categories — Ovulating in Emotions, Bleeding in Love, and Fertile to Fly. All of us experience the sempiternal bliss of being in love. However, only a few do get a chance to stay with their soulmate till death do them part.

Ovulating in Emotions, as the name suggests, portrays the onset of falling in love. It is that time when one feels dreamy and quite literally, walking on clouds. It also stands for a time when one is immersed in all the beautiful thoughts that they cannot imagine life without their love. Bleeding in Love has poems explaining the heartbreak and the pain that follows it. As mentioned above, everyone’s love story doesn’t culminate in a happy ending. And that’s when the negative emotions sweep us off our feet. That’s how one bleeds in love. Moving ahead, Fertile to Fly brings forth the passion that essentially defines love. Physical intimacy and the need to be around one another is nothing but human. The poems in this section elaborate on that.

The poems are well-written with some of them standing out for their thought-provoking message. However, I personally felt the real essence got stuck in the medley of words that made reading it a complicated task.

Nevertheless, the book stands out for its different approach to the description of love and aesthetics. So if you want something based on the quintessential emotion of love, you might pick it.