In Praise of Fragments is a collection of 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 some 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 Souffrant.
Reviews
Shortly before she died of cancer in 2018, Alexander quit her usual formalism for a freer style that remains alive to history, philosophy and “ordinary earth.”
The lyrical passages in Meena Alexander’s eloquent final book track her lifetime of far-flung journeys, crisscrossing the globe, from her own childhood in Kerala, India, to Venice and Manhattan. New York City presides as destination of brave generations, who quickly learn its neighborhoods and alleyways, the idiosyncrasies of acceptance and the richest identity of mingling…
Excerpt from “Grandmother’s Garden” featured in The New York Times! Click here to read.
Published since her untimely passing in 2018, this is Meena Alexander’s last collection of works. It’s in these lyric fragments that the reader will discover the beautiful whole.
Alexander’s last work is a lesson in impermanence, transcendence, and the beauty and futility of trying to capture meaning in two hands and two eyes. Her fragments are time immemorial.
In this book, one notices long lines of prose rather than the poetically shaped verses typical of Alexander’s poetry. But her observations are offered with sharp attention to detail: “stretch marks on the belly of the sky”; “the garden as flesh, as mother space.” After all, the book is called In Praise of Fragments, and there is no denying the power of the resonances that echo through the interplay of memory and the living flesh of her surroundings.
Alexander fashions fragments as willful moments of witness… This wonderful collection teaches us that the fragment, like language, is full of both limits and possibilities.
Bright and lush, these ingratiating poems fly by but aren’t really fragments; each contains a well-articulated moment, and they are united by their reflections on our pasts and ourselves. “All of us live with ghosts./ This is part of what makes us human,” says a prelude poem, which ends affectingly, “Where and what is home? How much can a body be home?”—an important question given the geographic territory Alexander covered in her life and work. Wherever her poems head, she recalls “all that tethered me there.” VERDICT: Vibrant, approachable work; the Sulam poems are accompanied by Alexander’s exuberant drawings.