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.
Meena Alexander, Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Quickly Changing River (2008), Raw Silk (2004), and PEN Open Book Award–winning Illiterate Heart (2002), all published by Northwestern. She is the author of the book of essays Poetics of Dislocation and the critically acclaimed memoir Fault Lines.