Praise
Divya Victor’s Curb is extraordinary: it is a sobering poetic look at how white supremacy “curbs” the brown civilian who can slip between Muslim and Black, between terrorist and illegal. If they’re not targeted for what they are, they’re mistaken for what they’re not—with sometimes fatal consequences. Victor explores the murders of South Asians in America with piercing acumen, re-arranging historical documents into wholly original compositional strategies that draws me in but also pushes me back. I can never know what happened, only perceive the disquieting absence of lives annihilated by structural violence. Layered, rich, and epic, Curb is an incredible collection that must be read and re-read.
-Cathy Park Hong
Divya Victor’s fine-spun Curb carefully tracks, documents, and descriptively elucidates the vertitable language of testimony to make visible the invisibility of South Asians, particularly those targeted and erased by domestic terrorism and violence in the United States. These poems speak with potency as they innovate methods of thinking about what a speaker can witness and who they can address. These poems buck the traditional lyric to go to the matters of the “she in me,” to what is “swollen and pressing,” to the “birth certificates” and the “death certificates,” and to the lives that are “settled out of suitcases.” She writes deepening sequences that evoke the “locution/location” at the heart of migration. Curb is as extraordinary as her previous book, Kith, and continues to build on its perceptual engagements. This collection is an outstanding document that locates us in the coordinates of an abode where we can discuss who gets counted, heard, or “read” with the compassion and love required to belong in community.
-Prageeta Sharma
Fiercely lyric in tone, Curb simultaneously limns a documentary poetics of loss—of land, language, family, connections, dignity and life even. Making the reader her accomplice and co-creator, Victor enters language and languaging itself, including utterance, sound and translation, to wrest from the experience of displacement, racism and wrongful death a lambent work suffused with a poetics of relation and love, which resists systems designed to humiliate and degrade—a work of emboldened, embodied poetics that does the necessary labor that presages something new.
Read Curb for:
- its fierce lyricism
- its documentary poetics of loss
- its tender urgency and its urgent tenderness
- how it ferries language across crevasses created by the tongue
- how it bears witness to witnessing
- how (un)mothered tongues live under curb
- how love petitions the heart even as it breaks under the wait in time
- how story ‘stories’ and stores memory
- how it takes sides
- how it shines a light in dark times
Read Curb!
-M. NourbeSe Philip
Divya Victor’s innovative lyrical exactness lays bare the US nationalist project and movingly documents and reenacts exact moments of diasporic bodies lived out in place and history. Curb maps out the exact locations of post-9/11 white-supremacist violence against South Asians with exact markings of dots, lines, squares, DMS coordinates, soundscapes, diacritical marks, Latin, Hindi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Tamil, and “No English.” Curb’s existential coordinates of exactitude cast a powerful spell against empire’s geography.
-Don Mee Choi
In startling, inventive poetry, Divya Victor’s book embodies the many meanings of the word “curb” —how it arrives as a bit, a check, a swelling, an imperative towards restraint, and as a community’s plea to curb white supremacist violence. Curb edges a concrete path of South Asian immigrant memory and witness and grief and fear and anger and beauty and communion and resistance. Divya Victor commemorates the slain, remembers their names, and marks coordinates of displacement and connection. Grounded in community devotion, Curb is a moving memorial and a deeply thoughtful, passionate, and wrenching book.
-Gabrielle Civil
Curb by Divya Victor is an astonishing new book of poems that raises anti-South Asian violence to the surface of awareness, urging a conversation about the way bodies are marked. Documenting a relationship to land, geography, and location, the mark becomes a kind of bull’s eye on bodies that are indecipherable and unnameable by America’s flat tongue, yet targeted nonetheless. The words for saying any of this are at the curb/the gutter, and it’s there, too, where the person is made object/inhuman. Victor’s poems won’t soothe you if that’s what you’re looking for. They do something far more necessary; they vibrate under your tongue like letters from the dead.
-Dawn Lundy Martin
