Title: Remnants: A Journey through Grief, Love and Becoming
Author: Aarti Upadhyay
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1. “Remnants” feels like an emotional excavation—what was the moment that told you these poems needed to live outside your private journal and into the hands of readers?

There was a turning point—when I realized my private words weren’t just my own anymore. Friends who read early drafts would say, “This feels like you wrote my story.” That resonance changed everything. The poems stopped being personal catharsis and became something larger—a dialogue about grief that so many of us experience but struggle to name. Remnants had to exist in the world because healing doesn’t happen in isolation. These poems are proof that even in our loneliest pain, we’re never truly alone.

2. You’ve spent over a decade helping brands find their voice. How different was it to finally give voice to your own grief and emotional landscape through poetry?

The fundamental difference lies in the compass of truth. With brands, I craft transformational narratives – distilling complex ideas into compelling messages designed to resonate. But with Remnants, I wasn’t shaping perception; I was excavating raw emotion. Every poem had to pass one test: Does this feel absolutely true to my experience?

Where brand storytelling often smooths edges for appeal, these poems needed their rough edges intact – the messy, uncomfortable realities of grief that don’t fit neatly into arcs or takeaways. This was truth-telling without strategy, vulnerability without a conversion goal. The only metric that mattered was authenticity.

3. There’s a strong current of ‘becoming’ in your work—was there a specific event, revelation, or relationship that helped shape the ‘you’ who emerged in these pages?

The real transformation began when I stopped running from grief and learned to sit with it – a lesson my psychiatrist, Dr. Sarthak Dave, gently guided me toward. Our sessions became a crucible where pain wasn’t something to fix, but to understand. That shift from resistance to acceptance was the first step in my “becoming.”

Through those conversations, I discovered that healing isn’t about returning to who you were before the loss, but making space for who you need to become. Remnants captures that alchemical process how grief, when fully faced, can reshape you into someone more tender, more resilient, and paradoxically, more alive.

4. Your poems feel both raw and refined—how do you balance vulnerability with craft when writing about something as deeply personal as grief? 

Poetrybecame my vessel: a place where grief could exist in its purest, most untamed form.

I never set out to polish the rawness. These poems aren’t filtered or performative; they’re the unvarnished truth of what it means to hurt and heal. As a writer, my role wasn’t to refine the emotion, but to preserve it—to let the cracks show, to let the words ache exactly as the heart did.

That’s where their power lies: not in pretty metaphors, but in their refusal to look away. Remnants is grief captured mid-breath—messy, alive, and utterly unconcerned with being beautiful.

5. Dogs, as you say, show us pure love. Is there a poem in the collection inspired by a canine companion—or do they influence your writing in quieter ways?

While Remnants doesn’t include a poem specifically about dogs, their unconditional love remains one of life’s purest gifts. There’s something sacred about the way a dog chooses you their devotion isn’t earned or negotiated; it’s given freely, without bounds or expiration dates. That kind of love leaves its mark quietly, teaching us how to receive and cherish without reservation.

If there’s any love that rivals it, perhaps only a mother’s comes close both are elemental, instinctive, and unshakable. Though these themes don’t appear explicitly in the collection, they live in the margins, reminding me that even in grief, such boundless love exists.

6. In marketing, messaging is often outcome-driven. In poetry, the goal can be less tangible. What part of your professional life did you have to unlearn to write ‘Remnants’?

Surprisingly, none. The core principle remained the same across both worlds: authentic storytelling that transforms. In marketing, we shape truth to create connection; in poetry, I uncovered truth to reveal connection. The difference was simply one of direction – turning the lens inward rather than outward.

What carried over was the discipline of emotional precision. Just as a strong brand message distils complexity into clarity, these poems had to articulate grief with that same exacting honesty. The “outcome” shifted from engagement to understanding, but the commitment to truth stayed unchanged.

7. You observe emotions with the precision of a psychologist. Do you think writing poetry is a form of emotional research for you?

Poetry isn’t my microscope – it’s my release valve. Where a researcher might analyze emotions, I expel them onto the page with all their messy, unvarnished truth. Each poem becomes an act of liberation – transforming the unsaid into something tangible I can finally loosen my grip on.

This raw transfer from heart to paper creates its own kind of freedom. The moment ink meets page, what was trapped inside becomes separate from me. Not studied, not solved – simply set free.

8. If your book could sit beside one other title on a shelf meant to guide someone through loss, which book would that be—and why?

If Remnants could sit beside one other title to guide someone through loss, I’d choose two:

Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother for its unflinching honesty, how it holds grief like a living thing, tender and snarling all at once. And Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which maps loss with such precision that it becomes a compass for the shattered.

While my work humbles itself beside these masters, we share the same creed: that grief, when written rawly, becomes both witness and salve. These books don’t offer answers they offer company. And sometimes, that’s the only guidance we need.