“Sanghvi’s Baby Vamp is a kind of counter-allegorical figure that has internalized Milton’s Sin, giving her a new post-Miltonic afterlife…”

“Confessions of a Baby Vamp: Letters to John Milton is an electrifying (“high-voltage” is right!) epistolary engagement with Milton’s Paradise Lost. In particular, it takes up the problem of Milton’s allegorical figure Sin, who engenders Death after being raped by her father Satan. Death, in turn, rapes Sin, who gives birth to the hellhounds, which continuously traumatize Sin by returning to her womb to feast on her bowels before “bursting forth / Afresh.” This is, to be sure, a theodical problem; so too does it reprise, with an intensive gruesomeness, scenes of sexual violence and tropes of female monstrosity from classical antiquity. “I blame you,” says Sanghvi’s Baby Vamp to Milton, “for not sparing her from the cruel, violent, and misogynistic ways of human reality.” Nevertheless, it is important to note that Sanghvi is writing with as much as writing against Milton.”

— Michael Leong, Excerpts from Confessions of a Baby Vamp: Letters to John Milton “Preface”