Meena Alexander - Böcker

A wide-ranging anthology of twentieth-century and contemporary writing from India and the Indian diaspora, curated by a distinguished scholar and poetInternationally renowned scholar, poet, and essayist Meena Alexander brings together leading twentieth- and twenty-first-century voices from India and the diaspora in this anthology. Contributors include English-language luminaries such as R. K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, and Arundhati Roy and powerful writers in Indian languages such as U. R. Ananthamurthy, Mahasweta Devi, and Lalithambika Antherjanam. This book will make a thoughtful gift for poetry and fiction enthusiasts and fans of Indian literature, as well as an ideal volume for academics introducing writers from the subcontinent.

Poetics of Dislocation sets the work of contemporary American poetry within the streams of migration that have made the nation what it is in the twenty-first century. There are few poets better qualified to muse on that context than Meena Alexander, who spent her life studying at prestigious institutions around the globe before settling in the United States to work on her acclaimed body of poetry. Part of the University of Michigan Press's award-winning Poets on Poetry series, Poetics of Dislocation studies not only the personal creative process Alexander uses, but also the work of other prominent writers. Alexander discusses what it means to come to America as an adult to write poetry, and her place---and that of others---in the collection of cultures that makes up this country. She outlines the dilemmas that face modern immigrant poets, including how to make a place for oneself in a new society and how to write poetry in a time of violence worldwide.

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 many 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 Suffrant.

According to the Kama Sutra, the erotic handbook written two thousand years ago, when the wheel of ecstasy is in motion "there is no textbook at all, and no order." Indian Love Poems is a unique gathering of poems from across more than two and a half millennia that attempts to catalog the disordered ecstasies of love, ranging from the Kama Sutra and earlier works up to present-day India and the poets of the Indian diaspora.Emerging from many Indian cultures and eras, the poems collected here reflect a variety of erotic and spiritual passions, and celebrate the powerful role of desire-both male and female-in the intricate dance of existence. From the twelfth-century female poet Mahadeviyakka to the twentieth-century Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore to such contemporary poets as Kamala Das and Vikram Seth, this glittering tapestry of lyric voices beautifully and sensually evokes the transfiguring force of love.