WINNER
The 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize

WINNER
The 2022 PEN America Open Book Award

FINALIST
2022 CLMP FIRECRACKER AWARDS (POETRY)

Curb by Divya Victor is an astonishing new book of poems that raises anti-South Asian violence to the surface of awareness, urging a conversation about the way bodies are marked. Documenting a relationship to land, geography, and location, the mark becomes a kind of bull’s eye on bodies that are indecipherable and unnameable by America’s flat tongue, yet targeted nonetheless. The words for saying any of this are at the curb/the gutter, and it’s there, too, where the person is made object/inhuman. Victor’s poems won’t soothe you if that’s what you’re looking for. They do something far more necessary; they vibrate under your tongue like letters from the dead.