Northwestern University Press, 2004 Cloth: 978-0-8101-5156-7 | eISBN: 978-0-8101-6668-4 | Paper: 978-0-8101-5158-1 Library of Congress Classification PR9499.3.A46R39 2004 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | EXCERPT | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
A deeply moving collection from a poet who crosses borders
New York City poet Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India and divided her childhood between India and the Sudan. From her cross-cultural perspective, Alexander writes with moving intensity of post-September 11 events as she evokes violence and civil strife, love, despair, and a hard-won hope. This autobiographical cycle of poems reflects the surrealism of such a life, and is shot through with the frissons of pleasure and pain, of beauty and tension, that mark a truly global identity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
MEENA ALEXANDER, distinguished professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Illiterate Heart (Northwestern, 2002), winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award. Her memoir Fault Lines (Feminist Press, 1993) was one of Publishers Weekly's best books of 1993, and her novel Nampally Road (Mercury House, 1991) was a 1991 Voice Literary Supplement Editor's Choice.
REVIEWS
"Meena Alexander sings of countries, foreign and familiar, places where the heart and spirit live, and places for which one needs a passport and visas. Her voice guides us far away and back home. The reader sees her visions and remembers, and is uplifted." —Maxine Hong Kingston
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"Raw Silk demonstrates the rare blend of an acute, utterly contemporary intelligence with a sensuality that is, in itself, a radical way of processing information. In its profound and polyglot sense of world citizenship gained through the indelible experience of exile, Meena Alexander has written what is--not at all paradoxically--a book that's quintessentially a New Yorker's. This is a poetry which earns the reader's trust, even, or especially, when the paths it takes in its explorations of the writer's multiple worlds and of the forms poetry can make of them are unexpected." —Marilyn Hacker, author of Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dialogue by a City Wall
Ancestors
Late, There Was an Island
1. Aftermath
2. Invisible City
3. Pitfire
Hard Rowing
Kabir Sings in a City of Burning Towers
Ghalib's Ghost
School Yard
September Sunlight
Listening to Lorca
1. Color of Home
2. Casida of a Flowering Tree
3. Central Park, Carousel
Hungriest Heart
For a Friend Whose Father Was Killed on the Lahore Border in the 1965 War between India and Pakistan
Firefly
Child, Stone, Sea
Green Parasol
Raw Silk
Rumors for an Immigrant
Blue Lotus
Petroglyph
Porta Santa
Roman Ground
Lago di Como
Door
Opening in the Shutters
Field in Summer
Triptych in a Time of War
Red Bird
Amrita
In Naroda Patiya
Searching for a Tomb over Which They Paved a Road
Letters to Gandhi
1. Lyric with Doves
2. Slow Dancing
3. Bengali Market
4. Gandhi's Bicycle (My Muse Comes to Me)
Fragile Places
Notes
Acknowledgments
EXCERPT
Central Park, Carousel
June already, it's your birth month,
nine months since the towers fell.
I set olive twigs in my hair
Torn from a tree in Central Park,
I ride a painted horse, its mane a sullen wonder.
You are behind me on a lilting mare.
You whisper-What of happiness?
Dukham, Federico. Smoke fills my eyes.
Young, I was raised to a sorrow song
short fires and stubble on a monsoon coast.
The leaves in your cap are very green.
The eyes of your mare never close.
Somewhere you wrote: Despedida,
If I die leave the balcony open!
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