According to author and illustrator Vaishnavi Balodi, “some things are always said better when in worse.” A conversation around this idea eventually led Balodi and writer Georgina Maddox to title their latest book Better Said In Verse (BlueRose Publishers).
“The phrase carries a pun,” Balodi explains. “‘Better said in worse’ points to how emotions often come out more honestly at their lowest, and ‘verse’ enhances the expression — because poetry allows those feelings to be expressed more freely.”
Better Said In Verse explores abstract and personal themes such as love, loss, longing, resistance, and belonging, while also dealing with ideas of nature and the environment. The book features two feminine voices from Uttarakhand — both from different generations, however sharing similar emotional and creative views.
Importantly, the book is not just a collection of poems. It also features colourful, dream-like illustrations by Balodi that move alongside the text. Throughout the pages appear a hand holding a postcard-like note, a kettle with doors, a dark room washed in pink light filtering through a window, peculiar spirals, and cascading blue waterfalls—visual bits that express the poetry's emotional currents.
The book contains 40 poems in total — 20 by Maddox and 20 by Balodi — and took around a year to complete.
Poetry, love, and loss
Maddox is also a visual artist and an art critic-curator; her poetry makes up half of the book. Based in Delhi, she has been writing about art for nearly two decades, with her work appearing in various publications. Poetry, she says, gives her a space that is separate from her professional writing.
“Poetry is where I write about feelings, incidents, and people that have shaped my life,” Maddox says. “It doesn’t follow trends or formats. It allows me to slow down.”
Maddox addresses queerness, identity, and the silent battle of living in places that reject diversity in several of the poems in Better Said in Verse. Her poetry alludes to the experienced truths of LGBTQ+ existence — love, fear, and longing — without being explicitly assertive.
Additionally, she notes that she also has a strong affinity for the natural world, which was influenced by her upbringing in hills (in Uttarakhand). “There’s a grandness to the mountains,” she adds. “It gives you an awareness of how everything is connected. When that balance is disturbed, we all feel it.” Environmental concern, climate change, and the fragile relationship between development and ecology surface gently across her poems.
One of Maddox’s poems reflects on losing her mother at the young age of 13. The intense and otherwise indescribable emotions are given shape in the form of poetry.
“I was thirteen… My mother was dying of cancer… Was this her punishment… For being Beautiful? For singing? I had no answers.”
Similar rhythms
Maddox is influenced by poets such as Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath, and Rabindranath Tagore/ She admits that her connection to poetry has always been innate and much impacted by music. She says, "I've always connected with poetry because it has a kind of rhythm to it," adding that her upbringing in a musical household influenced how she thinks and listens to words. She is an avid listener of many types of music and feels that poetry, even when it deviates from conventional rhyme schemes, has a similar rhythm. “Even when it doesn’t rhyme, there’s an internal music,” she says. “That’s what stays with the reader.”
Doodling emotions
Balodi’s illustrations are like a second language in the book which does not require reading.
She explains how the process is quite instinctive: "Whenever I read something, it turns into an image in my head.” Her first graphic novel, created in 2020 and based on her dreams, caught the eyes of many.
Although Balodi had been writing poetry for years, the personal writings were never disclosed publicly. “I write only when something needs to be processed,” she says. “There’s no planning.” Her poems in the book speak about the themes of family, aspiration, art, and becoming.
One of her most personal pieces in the book is a poem about her father, who himself was an artist in the early years of career, and even supported Vaishnavi walking in similar footsteps. “I am here because of him,” she says, recalling how watching him draw and design inspired her to become an artist.