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Description
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.
About the Author
MEENA ALEXANDER is an award-winning author and scholar whose previous volumes of poetry include Birthplace with Buried Stones, Quickly Changing River, Raw Silk, and Illiterate Heart (winner of the PEN Open Book Award), all published by TriQuarterly/Northwestern. Her poetry has been translated into several languages and set to music. She is also the author of an acclaimed autobiography, Fault Lines, as well as two novels; an academic study, Women in Romanticism; and a collection of essays, Poetics of Dislocation. Alexander is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York and teaches at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Praise For…
"Alexander's language is precise, her syntax is pellucid, and her poems address all of the senses, offering a simultaneous richness and simplicity."—A. E. Stallings, author of Olives: Poems
"Oscillating among familiar forms, Alexander cultivates a tension between form and content as her philosophical interventions frequently transcend the neat and seemingly legible structures they inhabit... Alexander’s collection succeeds most in charged moments when the hybridity of the language invites complexity into her meditations on race, alterity, and gender." —Publishers Weekly
"In Atmospheric Embroidery, Meena Alexander takes us on her magic carpet ride of language and image. Reading her is the pleasure of displacement, but also the sadness of inescapable loss. She makes me cry. She makes me happy." —Nell Painter, author of The History of White People and Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over
"The beautiful paradox of Meena Alexander’s art has always been found in the distillation of her epic human and spiritual experience into a pure and exquisite lyricism. That paradox and that lyricism are on triumphant display in this book."—Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer prize-winning author of 3 Sections and The Long Meadow
"From the real to the mythical to the fantastical, Meena Alexander takes the reader to vivid and unusual places. With motifs of birds and flight, intermingling with fire, Atmospheric Embroidery warbles and smolders in surprising and memorable ways. —Peter Kahn, co-editor, The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks
