Arundhathi Subramaniam's poems explore ambivalences -- the desire for adventure and anchorage, expansion and containment, vulnerability and strength, freedom and belonging, withdrawal and engagement, language as exciting resource and as desperate refuge. These are poems of wonder and precarious elation, and all the roadblocks and rewards on the long dangerous route to recovering what it is to be alive and human. Winner of the inaugural Khushwant Singh Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize, When God Is a Traveller is a remarkable book of poetry.