Kavya Kotha’s Echoes: Where Gen Z’s angst meets a moth’s instinct for light

But in our era of war, deteriorating environment, and uncertain futures, is it really unsurprising that darkness has still seeped in? Kotha writes of children bleeding in the snow, buildings burning down, upset parents, blue lips and corpses, goodbyes and tears:

First praying for violence,
Then praying for peace.

The collection offers a glimpse into the uncertainties plaguing young minds, mixed with teenage angst, everything from the pitfalls of being the eldest sibling to ​uncertainty about romance.

My mind is a silent graveyard,
Of people who never died
My heart’s a raging war field.
But there’s nobody to fight. ​

A cross between sad girl poetry, a genre popular on Instagram and TikTok, and confessional writing, it articulates the existential anxieties shadowing Generations Z and Alpha with cosmopolitan imagery and metaphor, fitting for a generation that grew up in the age of social media.

The collection, however, offers a refreshingly honest voice in the age of easy AI plagiarism, both through writing and art, reminding many of the tangle of thoughts of a teenager on the cusp of adulthood, but not quite. It has been a tradition, now absorbed into popular culture, to prefix ‘sweet’ when a woman turns 16, but Kotha gives an honest appraisal of what it feels like to be an almost-adult woman: one step away from being a fallen angel, while expected to emulate goddesses.