Divya Victor’s innovative lyrical exactness lays bare the US nationalist project and movingly documents and reenacts exact moments of diasporic bodies lived out in place and history. Curb maps out the exact locations of post-9/11 white-supremacist violence against South Asians with exact markings of dots, lines, squares, DMS coordinates, soundscapes, diacritical marks, Latin, Hindi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Tamil, and “No English.” Curb’s existential coordinates of exactitude cast a powerful spell against empire’s geography.

In startling, inventive poetry, Divya Victor’s book embodies the many meanings of the word “curb” —how it arrives as a bit, a check, a swelling, an imperative towards restraint, and as a community’s plea to curb white supremacist violence. Curb edges a concrete path of South Asian immigrant memory and witness and grief and fear and anger and beauty and communion and resistance. Divya Victor commemorates the slain, remembers their names, and marks coordinates of displacement and connection. Grounded in community devotion, Curb is a moving memorial and a deeply thoughtful, passionate, and wrenching book.