Atmospheric Embroidery

by Meena Alexander

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810137608
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	06/15/2018
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

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.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Aesthetic Knowledge
Indian Ocean Blues

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Atmospheric Embroidery"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Meena Alexander.
Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents
1
Aesthetic Knowledge              
Attar   
Darling Coffee
Little Burnt Holes                              
Debt Ridden                           
 
Indian Ocean Blues
Shook Silver
Human Geography
Song Lines
 
Studio   
Network
Bright Passage                                 
Blues
 
2
The Journey
 
Indian Ocean Blues
Dwelling
Fermata
Udisthanam
 
Phillis Wheatley Suite
Sticks and Stones
Slow Burn
            
Magnificat
Darfur Poems
Sand Music                               
In Our Lifetime             
Green Leaves of El Fasher                                  
 Nurredin                                              
 Last Colors
Child’s  Notebook                  
There She Stands                                            
Harlem Cleopatra
Fragment in Praise of the Book                                  
Night Theater
          
3
Atmospheric Embroidery        
Univocity                                            
            Provincetown by the Sea
            Scrim-Scram of Music
            Torn Branches
            Ars Poetica
            Bathtub Blues
            This is not a Dream
            Black Sand at the Edge of the Sea
                                               
Indian Ocean Blues
Inwood Sita
Tarawad
Syncopation
 
Dwelling                                 
Fragments of an Inexistent Whole                                                     
Death of a Young Dalit                      
Chilika Lake               
Dreaming in Shimla - Letter to My Mother
Game of  Ghosts                
Moksha                                                           
Staggering Skyward                                        
No Rescue (with Toy Cars)   
 
Crossroad
 
Indian Ocean Blues
Lyric Ego

Notes and Acknowledgements 73

Editorial Reviews

09/03/2018
Alexander (Birthplace with Buried Stones) strives to articulate how an “invisible grammar holds us in place” as she considers ways that Western culture attempts to mitigate otherness—to contain and subdue the implicit threat to the social order, that “Earthly unsettlement.” 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. In “Phillis Wheatley Suite” she writes, “Afterwards to pour yourself/ Into words, into that strangest lyre, strings sucked// Tongue torqued, fierce filigree/ God, Master, White, Ethiop, words sentient, insolvent.” However, the work’s texture is somewhat conventional and does not do justice to Alexander’s investigations of gender, language, and power. For example, compared to “Ancestors startled in sepia, eyes wide open,” passages such as “One by one she composed her lines/ She numbered each with finicky care, struck—Send” are bound to underwhelm. Readers may find themselves wishing to see Alexander’s fierce and ambitious thinking reflected to a greater extent in her words and phrases. Alexander’s collection succeeds most in charged moments when the hybridity of the language invites complexity into her meditations on race, alterity, and gender. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"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

From the Publisher