"Elegy in a Ghazal Frame: Formal Hybridity and Collective Memory in Shanta Acharya's 'Find Me' (2025)"

This paper examines Shanta Acharya's poem "Find Me" (2025) as a formally hybrid composition that fuses the structural echoes of the Ghazal with the elegiac movement of mourning and remembrance.Through a close reading informed by but not confined to New Critical principles, the paper argues that Acharya's poem transforms the refraindriven poetics of the Ghazal into an instrument of collective lament.The repeated invocation "find me" operates simultaneously as refrain, plea, and act of memorial retrieval-binding together fragmented voices of refugees, exiles, and the dead into a communal utterance of survival and witness.By juxtaposing the autonomy of Ghazal couplets with the cumulative trajectory of the Elegy, Acharya generates a dialogic form where absence becomes presence through repetition and echo.The study further contends that a purely formalist reading, such as one grounded in New Criticism, cannot fully account for the ethical and historical dimensions of "Find Me"-its invocation of war, displacement, and personal bereavement.Integrating contextual awareness, the paper situates Acharya's poem within diasporic poetics of loss, demonstrating how "Find Me" transcends private elegy to articulate a shared, transnational grammar of grief and remembrance.