White Elephants

by Reetika Vazirani

Overview

Images of Reetika Vazirani's native India intertwine with memories of her American adolescence in this prize-winning collection of poems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807068335
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	05/31/1996
Series:	Barnard New Women Poets
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	108
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.31(d)

Editorial Reviews

Here is a young writer's book about the richness and confusion, conundrums, the music, the flavors, the constant questioning of a genuinely multicultural existence. . . [White Elephants] engages and compels the reader. —Marilyn Hacker

From the Publisher

"Culture shock is not your reflex leaving the dock;/ it is when you have been a law-abiding citizen/for more than ten years: when someone asks your name/ and the name of your religion and your first thought is/ I don't know." With those lines, found in the opening pages of this winner of the 1995 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, Vazirani clearly enunciates her task: to sum up the immigrant's experience in precise and evocative language. In the poems that follow, she shows how much the old world insinuates itself into the new. From Part 1, "Mrs. Biswas," where that noble matriarch "scolds a god, possibly Mahakali, the Great One, for/ tangling/ her boot-black hair in a comb" and reflects that she must buy "eighteen nylon saris/ and Walkmans for my India trip,'' through Part 2, "The Rajdhani Express," ("I have lived here before"). to Part 3 "White Elephants," a series of 42 sonnetlike pieces that opens with a new passport and closes with a son receiving his first erector set, Varizani treats the immigration as an extended voyage that is never quite over. These detailed, thoughtful poems never fall into the trap of seeming exotic. Recommended for larger poetry collections.Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

Library Journal