Meena Alexander

In Praise of Fragments, the last book from internationally acclaimed poet Meena Alexander, who passed away in late 2018 collects various and inter-related works, including a sequence of poems written about Venetian Jewish poet Sarra Copia Sulam (1592-1641), lyric essays about Venice, a suite of poems about Hyderabad, where Alexander lived for many years, and a series of brief sketches of memoir about her childhood in Kerala, the subject of her groundbreaking memoir Fault Lines. The writings are accompanied by a series of sumi ink drawings by Alexander and an afterword by Leah Suffrant.

In Praise of Fragments

'I haven't read anything close to her sense of trans-culture since V.S. Naipaul, another writer of Indian post colonialism....[A]s a writer, she is the voice of an exile....She is thoughtful and expressive....has a keen mind and is socially conscious.' Korean QuarterlyAcclaimed South Asian-American poet and novelist Meena Alexander unleashes a fury of prose and poetry to confront the stereotypes and explore the challenges facing postcolonial immigrants in America.

Reflections on Postcolonial Experience

The Shock of Arrival

This Indian American writer builds upon her acclaimed memoir, named a PW Best Book for 1993.

A Memoir

Fault Lines

Mira Kannadical returns to India after graduate school in England to teach, but when she moves into a house on Nampally road in Hyderabad, she must come to terms with the conflicts and contradictions of life in modern India.

A Novel

Nampally Road

Alexander's cross-cultural perspective and sense of global identity (gained from her childhood in India and the Sudan, and her adult life in New York City) infuses her poems. She writes about violence and civil strife, love, despair, and a hard-won hope in the midst of a post-September 11 world.

Poems

Raw Silk

Recipient, 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship With her strong voice and precise language, Meena Alexander has crafted this visceral, worldly collection of poems. The experience she brings to the reader is sensual in many senses of the word, as she invokes bright colors, sounds, smells, and feelings. Her use of vivid imagery from the natural world—birds, lilies, horses—up against that from the world of humans—oppression, slavery, and violence—ties her work to the earth even as she works a few mystical poetic transformations. In Alexander’s world, the songs of a bird can become the voice of a girl in a café and the red juice of mulberries can be as shocking as blood. When she focuses her attention on the cloth of a girl’s sari, the material of a woman’s life, or the blood in her veins, she speaks to the particular experience of women in the world. The women are vividly present—sometimes they are hidden or veiled, juxtaposed with open gardens in full bloom. It is difficult not to come away from Quickly Changing River without a new sense of the power and frailty of being alive. Aletheia (Girl in River Water) First I saw your face, The your whole body lying still Hands jutting, eyelids shut Twin nostrils flare, sheer Efflorescebce when memory cannot speak- a horde of body parts glistening.

Quickly Changing River

Atmospheric Embroidery

Large sweeping novel set in India and New York, from a leading Indian-American author.

Manhattan Music

With their intense lyricism, Meena Alexander’s poems convey the fragmented experience of the traveler, for whom home is both nowhere and everywhere. The landscapes she evokes, whether reading Bashō in the Himalayas, or walking a city street, hold echoes of otherness. Place becomes a palimpsest, composed of layer upon layer of memory, dream, and desire. There are poems of love and poems of war—we see the rippling effects of violence and dislocation, of love and its aftermath. The poems in Birthplace with Buried Stones range widely over time and place, from Alexander’s native India to New York City. We see traces of mythology, ritual, and other languages. Uniquely attuned to life in a globalized world, Alexander’s poetry is an apt guide, bringing us face to face with the power of a single moment and its capacity to evoke the unseen and unheard.

Birthplace with Buried Stones

A definitive compilation of poetry reflecting the diverse cultures and history of the Indian subcontinent ranges from the two-thousand-year-old Kama Sutra to the works of poets from modern-day India and the Indian diaspora, including poems by such notables as Mahadeviyakka, Rabindranath Tagore, and Vikram Seth. 10,000 first printing.

Indian Love Poems

Winner of the 2002 PEN Open Book Award Recipient of 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship Meena Alexander's poetry emerges as a consciousness moving between the worlds of memory and the present, enhanced by multiple languages. Her experience of exile is translated into the intimate exploration of her connections to both India and America. In one poem the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi visits with her while she speaks on the phone in her New York apartment, and in another she evokes fellow-poet Allen Ginsberg in the India she herself has left behind. Drawing on the fascinating images and languages of her dual life, Alexander deftly weaves together contradictory geographies, thoughts, and feelings.

Illiterate Heart

In this book, acclaimed South Asian American poet and novelist Meena Alexander unleashes a fury of prose and poetry to confront the stereotypes and explore the challenges facing postcolonial immigrants in America. Commenting on the history of memory, language, shame, and exile, Alexander poignantly describes the wealth of experiences and imaginings that have shaped her life and writing. Her project: "to make space for what was crossed out in the decorum of femininity, in the high places of classical hierarchy, in the racism of a canonical knowledge, in the obliterations of a national memory ... all this is part of our task, part of the violent, fractured worlds that we must etch into beauty".

In this haunting collection of poems we travel through zones of violence to reach the crystalline depths of words: Meena Alexander writes, "So landscape becomes us, / Also an interior space bristling with light." At the heart of this book is the poem cycle "Indian Ocean Blues," a sustained meditation on the journey of the poet as a young child from India to Sudan. There are poems inspired by the drawings of children from war-torn Darfur and others set in present-day New York City. These sensual lyrics of body, memory, and place evoke the fragile, shifting nature of dwelling in our times.

River and Bridge

Sets the work of contemporary American poetry within the streams of migration that have made the nation what it is in the 21st century. This book outlines the dilemmas that face modern immigrant poets, including how to make a place for oneself in a new society and how to write poetry in a time of violence worldwide.

Poetics of Dislocation

This Is The Story Of Mira Kannadical Who Lives Simultaneously In A Private World Of Lyrical Intensity And A Public World Of Violence And Torture.

Kamala Das

Anna Sujatha Mathai

The poetry of seven contemporary poets from Kerala (1934 - present), selected and edited by Gopikrishnan Kottoor is presented in this beautiful poetry anthology.LIVING POETRYThe fecundities of native language, culture, climate, topography, among myriad other indigenous resources precipitate the poetryscape of the Indian poet writing in English.More and more anthologies of the kind will help bring out the luxuriant variants of poetry from India that the world is presently looking at. Ventures such as this will go miles to further our poetry in English while helping to do away with threats from 'forces of standardization' as Sri K. Satchidanandan rightly observes.

English Poetry from Kerala, Seven Contemporary Poets: A Poetry Anthology

Living Poetry

What did it mean to write as a woman in the Romantic era? How did women writers test and refashion the claims or the grand self, the central 'I, ' we typically see in Romanticism? In this powerful and original study Meena Alexander examines the work of three women: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) the radical feminist who typically thought of life as 'warfare' and revolted against the social condition of women; Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855) who lived a private life enclosed by the bonds of femininity, under the protection of her poet brother William and his family; Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter that Wollstonecraft died giving birth to, mistress then wife of the poet Percy Shelley, and precocious author of Frankenstein. Contents: Introduction: Mapping a Female Romanticism; Romantic Feminine; True Appearances; Of Mothers and Mamas; Writing in Fragments; Natural Enclosures; Unnatural Creation; Revising the Feminine; Versions of the Sublime^

Meena Alexander

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