Curb
Winner of the 2022 PEN Open Book Award!
Winner of the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award!
Finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Awards in Poetry!
Curb maps our post-9/11 political landscape by locating the wounds of domestic terrorism at unacknowledged sites of racial and religious conflict across cities and suburbs of the United States.
Divya Victor documents how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living: lawns, curbs, and sidewalks, undergirded by violence but also constantly repaved with new possibilities of belonging. Curb witnesses immigrant survival, familial bonds, and interracial parenting in the context of nationalist and white-supremacist violence against South Asians. The book refutes the binary of the model minority and the monstrous, dark "other" by reclaiming the throbbing, many-tongued, vermillion heart of kith.
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In poems of brilliant aesthetic diversity and haunting imagery ('Stop bath & rinse, / then hang up this feeling/ by its arms'), Curb illuminates and challenges the boundaries that divide and discipline us.--Evie Shockley, NPR
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
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
Divya Victor's Natural Subjects, a tough-minded, audaciously structured, & subtly open-ended poem, closes in on the naturalization process by locating the small but bureaucratically nebulous frame of the passport photo and opening up the multi-layered points of stress and dislocated violence that frame marks... Nothing is telegraphed. The book keeps opening each time I pass through.--Anselm Berrigan
This acute work by Victor [Natural Subjects] teases civic ideologies in all their motley, pervasive constructions by writing from multiple subjectivities and engineering defiance, struggles with agency, language play, appropriated commentaries, and revelations of loss. A multi-faceted book of high interest.--Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Victor has written a book [Natural Subjects] that is both heart-breaking and a brilliant, effervescent and dark joke.--Bhanu Kapil
At just over 200-pages, Kith is, so to speak, a collection of many 'kindre' mini-books under the sign of transgenerational, transcultural, transhistorical, and translingual 'knownness' (kith, coming from the Old English cýððu). It combines oral legend, prose poems, list poems, visual poems, creatively annotated photographs sourced from family albums, quotations, and ritualistic verses and diagrams. It juxtaposes memoir, lyric art-historical essay, and image-text collage in a post-colonial key.--Michael Leong, Tarpaulin Sky
This [Things To Do With Your Mouth] is a fascinating, tightly wound work, elegantly wielding form to her theory.--Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Constant Critic
Curb is more than a personal poetics of loss and identity. It is even more than a well-written eulogy of five murdered South Asian Americans. It is a profound act of poetic debridement for the South Asian American diaspora, and an insistent plea to resist erasure by first acknowledging, absorbing, processing, and remembering our own communal histories.--Jenny Bhatt, NPR
The lush, slightly off-center diction in Divya Victor's CURB is immediately striking. In a poem set in a consulate, we read that 'they first lift / serosa from serosa.' Later, we learn how 'to pleach a tree, ' and to distinguish between 'aloe, an organ; saffron, an ovary.' This sparkling lyricism helps orientate us as we navigate and attempt to cross the book's multiple thresholds.--Jay G. Ying, The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Books
Victor ends her verse with her own explanation of placing coordinates at the dog-ears of the pages, marking the presence of immigrants, leaving a trace. She explains the symbolism of the snail, carrying its home on its back.--Bethany Mary, Vagabond City
