CURB

Starred review from May 17, 2021
Victor’s unsettling latest (after Kith) chronicles the violence perpetrated against South Asians by domestic terrorists, government bureaucracy, and other agents of the state. While the poems offer an impressive array of linguistic and historical referents, they locate their political critique of white supremacy in the American suburbs. It is on neighborhood stoops and among garden beds that Victor, in her distinctive documentary poetic style, explores how “a yard is a measure, a curb its end,” emphasizing the risk to nonwhite individuals presumed to be trespassing in white spaces. Sections alternate from lineated poems to prose that is a mix between reportage and memoir. For example, her retelling of the murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla concludes: “On that day, I was pregnant & moving into my third trimester.” Victor explains, “All my poems are manifests/ for burials elsewhere,” and some poems even include GPS coordinates, inviting readers to seek out the places that are the impetus behind these mournful and angry reckonings with American violence. This stunning collection challenges readers to reconsider the fragile boundaries people share with one another as well as the reduction of bodies to mere scapegoats.

Starred review from April 15, 2021
This intensely multitudinous collection reflects the poet's heritage. Born in India, Victor has lived in Singapore and the U.S., and she explodes language through Tamilian-Anglophone lyrics. The book opens with the names of Indians and Indian Americans murdered by white supremacists in the wake of 9/11. This injustice serves as a refrain throughout, with GPS coordinates marked on certain pages to guide readers to find the exact locations of these atrocities. This is one way Victor tethers local incidents to global networks of information, art, and politics. Other poems co-opt language from U.S. immigration forms and imagine alternatives to bureaucratic discourse. Confronted with requests for concrete proof, the speaker considers the intangible evidence that establishes family relations, like recipes for sweet tea and dough batter. Other images prove to be unforgettable, such as an impromptu vigil (""you burn camphor on the stoop / so our names are spelled in flames""), the view from within a womb (""a ray breaking / the sticky pane / cranberry stained / glass womb"") and an intimate encounter (""how a mountain range marks the cusp / where one nation plunges / into another""). This is an incredibly well-crafted collection by a globally minded, locally rooted, exceedingly brilliant poet.

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