I have nothing else to offer, dear Life— words are what I breathe and eat, the clothes I wear, dreams that sing me to sleep, silence that greets me awake: words are the wealth I possess—my truth, my love. These lines from the title poem of Dear Life (LWL Books, 2025), Shanta Acharya’s eighth collection, showcase a poet’s true vocation and echo W. B. Yeats’s rhetorical question, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” One of India’s foremost poets, Acharya lives in London.