Kin is a collection of six essays that explore ecstasy, agony, and frisson as kinship catalysts in the South Asian diaspora through visual arts, film, architecture, and global Anglophone poetry. Whereas Kith and Curb have been concerned with what Tamil Sangam-era poets, in classical tradition, would have called puram—the external life of war and politics—Kin turns to the aesthetic category of akam, which centers aspects of life adjacent to these forces. Kin is curious about life lived out in disobedient tangents against such forces, through rich interiorities, sensuous intelligence, and across vast emotional and affective ranges. The work bridges two frames of experience that have not been prioritized in North American literatures: a Tamil-Indian girlhood that has shaped my understanding of aesthetics, global Anglophone poetry and poetics, and postcolonial attachments to what Dohra Ahmed has called “rotten Englishes” in a post-Patriot act era. This project affirms the significance of lives resonating outside dominant narratives in new registers—pearls of joy, giddy laughter, the blissful moan, the gasps of surprise, the susurrus of gossip and speculation. Kin is indebted to auto-theory-oriented nonfiction and memoir by Asian American and Black writers who theorize kinship at the amniotic boundaries between archives, memoir, and the essay. Kin privileges ways of knowing native to Tamil girls and elders who remain unassimilable into national narratives, who have been made invisible because of their gender, and remain unheard because of their age. These frames demand a new imagining of the essay as a non-western genre. Much of the book breaks with traditional notions of the essay to invent a prose-form that enacts the order, rhythm, and drape of the sari (புடவை puṭavai) worn by Tamil women—a pleating (not blending) of verse, vignettes, petits essais, and visual objects.