samodH Porawagamage

All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths

All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths is a child’s chronicle of the 2004 tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka. Its 4 sections respectively—though not chronologically—deal with the onset of the tsunami, its immediate aftermath, the long traumatic aftermath, and the experiences of tsunami survivors and victims other than the narrator/speaker // interviews with survivors. Taking a leaf out of Muriel Rukeyser’s highly influential poetic documentation of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster in The Book of the Dead, this firmly place-based collection attempts to capture a disaster without sensationalizing, trivializing, glorifying, or exploiting the tragedy.

Cover design: Kenji Liu
ISBN: 978-1-950404-19-3
Paperback: $18
Publication date: August 15, 2025

samodH Porawagamage is the author of becoming sam (Burnside Review Press) and All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths. His writing focuses on the Sri Lankan Civil War, poverty & underdevelopment, colonial & imperial atrocities, and disproportionate impacts of climate change on rural & marginalized communities. He lives in a Colombo suburb called IDH, short for Infectious Diseases Hospital.

Praise for All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths

All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths is a formally inventive and deeply felt exploration of disaster, time, memory, and narrative. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami provides the central motif—as a calamitous event and a long shadow—for the hybrid assemblage of poems, “interviews,” and letters, suggesting that catastrophe itself demands fragmented forms to be even partially understood. Porawagamage blends lyricism, humor, and high tragedy with remarkable ease, crafting a work that recognizes the presence of the afterlives of disaster and thus refuses easy endings. The collection reveals how catastrophe becomes embedded not only in individual and collective consciousness but also in the very genres through which we attempt its narration. All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths will help redefine how we read, write, and imagine disaster today. —Pallavi Rastogi, author of Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century

All the Salty Sand in Our Mouths is a book about disaster, yet also a book about language and its power. samodH Porawagamage’s second collection documents the tragedy of the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka and its aftermath. The speaker observes, “The tsunami crossed me over into another realm,” and the poems investigate this realm.  Through lyric and narrative modes, as well as epistolary forms and interviews, this collection explores what it means to mourn and elegize and document. Porawagamage writes, “What is drawn in water /doesn’t survive//the full circle of a letter/with a stick.’  And yet this is most of all a book about survival. —Nicole Cooley, author of Mother Water Ash