An ecothriller by Dheepa Maturi combines mysticism and technology
Dheepa Maturi served as Tweetspeak Poetry’s Poet Laura for 2023. We learned quite a bit about the monarch butterfly, as she wrote several posts for the Tweetspeak-proclaimed “Year of the Monarch.” And we learned she cared deeply about the environment; she helped readers celebrate Earth Day. We discovered how poetry could be applied to environmental and climate concerns.
And now we know what she’s been up to since then — publishing an ecothriller, entitled 108.
It’s sometime in the near future. The planet’s climate is in crisis, with the air in the cities almost unbreathable. Farmland has been affected as well, raising the possibility of famine. Agricultural production has been divided into 20 zones, and research has been underway to find ways to make those zones more productive.
Bayla Jeevan works in San Francisco for a monitoring service that scans everything for developing environmental trends and issues. And it is there that she has a vision and hears a voice, about a terrible environmental tragedy unfolding. Yet nothing is showing on any of the monitoring indicators.
The vision is confusing, involving black ooze. The voice is disconcerting; it is the voice of her father — who, she believes, has been dead for 15 years. An attack on her school in India had caused his death; at least, that’s what she believed. She herself had been spirited away to safety in the United States.
Bayla soon finds herself almost kidnapped back to India. She, and the special abilities she inherited from her mother, are needed. Something terrible is unfolding — a plot to make the agricultural zones appear more productive but eventually lead to their destruction. She discovers friends and allies in the fight to save agriculture; she experiences a bit of romance. And she finds danger and the possibility of death.
Dheepa Maturi
108 is a wild ride of a story; it fully deserves the descriptor of “ecothriller.” It deserves to be read closely to catch the allusions and nuances. (I had the advantage of reading it in one sitting in the back seat during a nine-hour automobile ride.)
Maturi is a writer, essayist, and poet whose work focuses on ecology, culture, identity, and their intersection. Her writing has been published in such literary journals as Literary Hub, PANK, The Fourth River, Sequestrum, and Tiferet.
Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she previously worked as an attorney, consultant, and education grant writer. She received her degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago, and she lives with her family in Indianapolis.
108 is informative as well as entertaining. The narrative could have slipped into polemic, but Maturi avoids it by focusing on the story she’s telling. And it is one exciting story.
Related:
Poet Laura: Invitation to Lightness from Dheepa Maturi
Photo by Yvesen, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
- “108”: An Ecothriller by Former Poet Laura Dheepa Maturi - June 17, 2025
- Dana Gioia Defines the Enchantment in Poetry - June 12, 2025
- “I Am the Arrow”: Sarah Ruden Tells Sylvia Plath’s Story - June 10, 2025
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