If We Gods Could Die For Her moves between two registers that turn out to be the same story: the elevated, scripture-like voice of a Hindu myth retold from the gods' own uneasy conscience, and the fractured, unflinching poetry of a mother raising a daughter the world has decided to be afraid of.

A girl is born to be feared. Made deliberately monstrous by Brahma himself, so that men might see their own cruelty reflected back at them and change, Pāro grows up marked as an abomination in a myth that was never meant to let her live happily. Alongside her, in the same house, in the same hospital corridors, a mother watches her own daughter come apart in ways no myth prepared her for.

Agni and Jatayu vow to protect the girl they cannot save. A mother learns which objects in the house are sharp. Ma Kali steps in where Brahma will not. Between them, Devjani Bodepudi asks what it costs to love something that has been called a demon before it was ever called by its own name.

Spare, image-driven and formally daring, poems fold in on themselves, punctuation drops away, a golden shovel bends towards Malika Booker. This is a collection about mothering through crisis, about bodies marked as other, and about what's left when the myth of protection fails and love has to do the work instead.

Contains references to violence, bullying, and allusions to depression and self-harm.