“How do we live when our pain does not dissipate? Is the heart a vector, or is it woven by swift hands on the night before we are born? Have you ever loved someone so deeply that you changed species to become a flower? Reading Ankur Kalra’s Ibadah, poems of love, desire, loss and passion, new and stirring questions about the soul’s journey as a beloved arise, perhaps, in the reader’s being. That these poems are written by an interventional cardiologist, someone who has touched what for so many of us is a vocabulary, a set of sensations, brings another dimension to the insights developed here. Who are we when we are not alone? Who are we when we are not with each other? I am honored to write in support of this mystical and visceral book.”

– Bhanu Kapi

About the Author

Dr. Kalra is an interventional cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, a university professor at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University, and founder of the non-profit startup, makeadent.org. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Radcliffe Cardiology’s US Cardiology Review, a peer-reviewed medical (cardiology) journal, and host of the medical (cardiology) podcast show, Parallax. He has presented late-breaking science at national and international scientific cardiovascular platforms, and has published over 130 scientific manuscripts in various peer-reviewed medical journals. Educated at Indira Gandhi Medical College (Shimla, India), Dr. Ankur Kalra completed medical and cardiology training at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (New Delhi, India), Cooper University Hospital (Camden, NJ), and Hennepin County Medical Center and Minneapolis Heart Institute (Minneapolis, MN). He served as a clinical and research fellow in interventional cardiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Boston, MA), and a clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA) in 2015-16. He then completed a year of advanced interventional and structural cardiology fellowship in 2016-17, at Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart and Vascular Center (Houston, TX). In addition to certifications, awards, and accolades, Dr. Kalra is board-certified in Internal Medicine (2012), Cardiovascular Disease (2015) and Interventional Cardiology (2016) from the American Board of Internal Medicine.