Both attentive and quiet in their witnessing and brave and thunderous in their longing, Natasha Rao has made a book of poems that feels entirely, beautifully, human.

—Ada Limón

In Latitude, a most captivating debut, a new kind of topography unfolds where "...I want to return from reincarnation’s spin covered in dirt and buds." Rao delivers in every sense of the word: a musical urgency and playfulness spring alive on every page– a timely demand to return to this extraordinary terrain again and again.

—Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Natasha Rao’s debut collection Latitude, is simultaneously an ode and a lament in which the tender wry speaker is “trying to suck on this impossible world as if it were a piece of ice in my mouth”: both to savor and to melt the world’s overabundance. The poems hover at the edge of transformations where the speaker is self and other, silenced and full of surprising apprehensions, yearnings. "In my next life let me be a tomato," she writes, "lusting and unafraid....I have always been scared of my own ripening, mother standing outside the fitting-room door." Familial love, guilt, and coming-of-age urgencies ripple with eros, aftershocks, and quick, understated humor that together lift these poems into “Orbit, memorably.”

—Catherine Barnett

Latitude is shockingly beautiful. Rao’s language is lyrical and direct, in poems that are formally playful and always immediate; their descriptive and emotional power is always right before your nose. These are poems about what it means to be only a small part of a family. These are poems about sharing the same brain with your brother, and having the same dreams in the night. And these poems long for this cocoon of childhood, while knowing that childhood is a lost civilization. As poems of memory and longing for both a time and a place, they’re even more beautiful, and much shorter, than Tintern Abbey. Just be prepared: your heart will swell and it just might burst.

—Matthew Rohrer

By dissecting familial memory, sexual awakening, and the feelings that were once new but are now old, Rao allows herself to grow into her many versions. She is tuned into the complexity of her longing within the framework of her changing life. Self-aware and direct, Latitude is timeless in its honesty.

—Jeevika Verma, NPR

Rao exhibits her acumen for vulnerability in her observations and creative muscularity…Rao’s speakers are present in each moment of self-implication: “I / bloat full of lies. Spurred by my / capacity for ruin.” And in the fullness of their humanity, the speakers exude a palpable tenderness—even when they misbehave—in a space where their sensibilities inch along the asymptote of grace.

—Meagan Washington, The Poetry Project

What impresses me most is the way that Rao collapses lushness with constraint, desire with contentment, regret with splendor, often in the same poem. Eschewing poetic trends, Rao has written a book that’s pure in its expression of human interiority, sacred in its flesh-warm humanity.

—Jacques Rancourt, Art Lit Lab