This is not a year when we need to be reminded how connected we are around the world — or how unevenly power and vulnerability are distributed among us. But Victor’s latest collection, in engaging these political realities, does not so much remind us of them as it locates us in them — and them in us — materially, physically, geographically. GPS coordinates pinpoint the site of brutal acts against Indian immigrants to the U.S. and their kin, who may be targeted as “Hindoos,” “mistaken for Arab,” or conflated with the categories of “Terrorist” and “Illegal Immigrant.”

Even as she memorializes victims of nationalist and imperialist violence, Victor draws us into scenes of domesticity and intimacy among Indian American and Indian families. She is in this way amazingly deft at revealing the overlap of the personal and political, as when she describes “the passport photograph/ you once stapled at the edge of a petition/ to anchor her womb/ to your migrating heart.” 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.