Sand & Sweat is a collection of poems by Ashanee Nihinsa Kottage. Each poem, like a ring on the bark of a tree, details emotional tumults over a decade–sharing mistakes, lessons, and celebrations of love, home, girlhood, and later, womanhood. This collection will massage your senses; through each chapter, Sand, Simmer, Sigh, Sea, Sum, Sweat, and Salt, you will yearn for the ground and the waves, you will feel rage and release it, calculate the geometry of your own heartbreaks, and savor the taste of sweet and salty delights. It is a seduction of sibilance, rhythm, and story.

• “Ashanee Kottage is a fantastically talented poet. These are lush poems that explore heartache, joy, homeland, belonging, and womanhood in a deep and powerful way. Sri Lanka should be very proud of this young artist.” Nayomi Munaweera, author of Island of a Thousand Mirrors (Asian Commonwealth Book Prize) and What Lies Between Us (Sri Lankan National Book Award and the Godage Award) 

• "Weaving English and Sinhalese, rage and desire, girlhood and womanhood, Ashanee writes with intimate defiance. SAND & SWEAT is rooting and remembering. It is dancing with gods and dirt and grandmothers. It is leading us into a new world." Caitlin Nasema Cassidy, co-founder and co-artistic director of LubDub Theatre Co., 2023 Grist 50 List Fixer

• "Sand and Sweat elevates colloquial language. The form blurs poetry and prose to free us from convention. Reminding us of the joining between the terrestrial and the supernatural." ~ Carine Gibert, founder and lead facilitator of Grounded in Motion