You could say Shruti Swamy’s debut has good bones. With a solid structure, eye-catching details, and plenty of room for readers to explore, A House Is a Body (Algonquin, Aug. 11) confounds expectations of what a short story collection can achieve. Set in India and the U.S., these 12 stories, written over the course of 10 years, explore reality, temporality, and corporeality in strange and wonderful ways: “The fallible characters in Swamy’s ravishing book are always falling into something and bravely grasping what they can on their way down in a frenetic attempt to pull themselves back up,” writes our reviewer in a starred review.The author spoke with Kirkus by phone from San Francisco. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

To me, your prose is lush, lyrical, and resonant. What’s your relationship to poetry?

I definitely have tried to write poetry over the years and have deep respect for it. Sometimes when I’m sitting down to write, the thing that helps me is listening to or reading a little bit of poetry, so I am a reader of poetry. I would love to read even more poetry. I feel like I understand how to browse fiction and find new fiction authors, but poetry is a little bit harder for me. There are definitely poets that I love: Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, Monika Sok, Shamala Gallagher. And I’m not a very good poet.

Really? Here’s the opening sentence of the titular story: “Not the scent of the smoke, but the sight of it, not the sight itself, but the screen through which it altered the sunlight—she couldn’t articulate the change exactly, it’s just that the light seemed odd, like the sour light of a nightmare.” Rhythm, rhyme, repetition, fluidity….

I was recently watching Sesame Street with my daughter, which I watch a lot—big fan—and Maya Angelou was talking to Big Bird. Big Bird was like, “What’s poetry?” She said, “Poetry is”—I’m just paraphrasing—"Poetry is language in rhythm and sometimes in rhyme.” That was a brilliant definition of poetry, because a child could understand it, and it’s actually really profound.

Rhythm in my sentences is very important to me. Sometimes I don’t hear all the words but I know what the rhythm is. That sentence, I worked and worked and worked on. It was originally published in the Paris Review, so I was working with the editor there. Often editors’ impulses are to cut the things that aren’t working, but sometimes I’ll push back, because the rhythm of the sentence, if it’s altered, sounds wrong to me. That sentence is a pretty extreme example of a rhythmic sentence, but I heard it very clearly. I was happy to go back and forth as many times as needed in order to get that rhythm.

Here’s how our review describes the opening story, “Blindness”: “Sudha, an architect and newlywed, struggles with a husband who can’t (and won’t) understand her depression. A dream of an alternate life may be the only cure for her persistent ‘black feeling.’ ” This story has a dreamlike quality that really makes it stand out. Why did you choose it to go first?

It’s maybe the most difficult story in the collection. I felt like it was the door to the collection. To me, if somebody could walk through that door—I guess it’s maybe more of a corridor—if somebody could walk through that story, [they could navigate the rest].

[As a writer] you do your best. You’re careful. Then there’s a space that we all enter as readers, where it becomes yours, just by walking through that story and making meaning out of it. So if all people get from that story is a kind of feeling…a taste in their mouths from the language, that is also a success to me. They don’t have to bring the meaning out of it that I put in there.

What does “Blindness” mean to you?

The biggest thing I was looking at was the idea of time being a spiral or a circle rather than a line. That’s a very Indian way of looking at things, in terms of karma, in terms of rebirth and what we accrue, looking at trauma, and how trauma echoes through generations. I was interested in looking at those things through my own understanding of Indian culture and Indian mythology.

What do you hope this collection means to readers?

Books can exist just because they’re pleasurable and it feels like a joy to read them. Even if there are other things that this book is doing and interested in, first and foremost, I hope that this book offers my readers some pleasure. If that’s all this book does, it would make me feel very satisfied to know that was their experience.

Megan Labrise is the editor at large and host of the Fully Booked podcast.