Press

BOOKLIST

“This is an incredibly well-crafted collection by a globally minded, locally rooted, exceedingly brilliant poet.”

– Diego Báez, for Booklist (Starred Review)

“Curb is more than a personal poetics of loss and identity. It is even more than a well-written eulogy of five murdered South Asian Americans. It is a profound act of poetic debridement for the South Asian American diaspora, and an insistent plea to resist erasure by first acknowledging, absorbing, processing, and remembering our own communal histories.”

– Jenny Bhat, for NPR

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“While the poems offer an impressive array of linguistic and historical referents, they locate their political critique of white supremacy in the American suburbs. [...] This stunning collection challenges readers to reconsider the fragile boundaries people share with one another as well as the reduction of bodies to mere scapegoats.”

(Starred Review)

Ploughshares

“Curb highlights an ongoing injustice in this country: that the only thing that connects an immigrant to the American land after their death (or murder) will be a ‘written/ . . . scrap tied to a place / which holds your feet / to the ground.’ Victor’s collection is thus a must-read, in its offering of a moving critique of the South Asian immigrant experience within post 9/11 America.”

– Sanchari Sur

RAINTAXI

“CURB is a literary milestone [that] extends to the farthest reaches of the heart. Victor channels the suffering and persistence of her subjects, and through a posthumous revisiting at once ritualistic and humanely revisionist, she builds a broader story that both honors them and includes us all.”

– Greg Bem

LOS ANGELES REVIEW

“Readers will feel like they have pressed and been pressed by this remarkable collection, which uses language as a weapon, as comfort, as demand, as identity, as gesture, and always, as connection.
Curb is akin to a modern jazz composition where the instruments—syntax, language, form, image—bend and break as contrast and amplification, and readers can appreciate the complexity of the work on a variety of levels.”

– Mandana Chaffa

HARRIET BOOKS | POETRY FOUNDATION

CURB is an epic and sprawling map, insistently exploring how the diasporic body unfolds over various pressure sites within cartographies of injury and empire. Its poems speak to the necessity of remembering the victims of anti-South Asian hate crimes, especially after 9/11. From immigration forms to shuttlecocks, Tamil lullabies to the Gulf War, The Arthashastra to a mélange of French theorists, CURB feels encyclopedically rigorous in its testimonials, documentary-poetics, and citations: it wants you to know it is serious about poetry and ethics.

– Jay G. Ying

OCTOBER Hill

︎︎︎︎︎

“Divya Victor’s latest collection, Curb, documents the day-to-day trauma — the consequence of colonialism, systemic racism, and hate crimes — experience by South Asian immigrants and Americans with crackling, poetic precision. In its transcription of both commonplace microaggressions and domestic joys, Victor’s collection illuminates the lived realities of belonging and unbelonging as an immigrant in America. Curb bears witness to the unacknowledged, invisible, and ever-present racism in urban and suburban America and commemorates South Asians killed by white supremacist violence, often, as the title suggests, on their own doorsteps.”

– Julianna Drew Björkstén

ASIAN AMERICAN WRITERS WORKSHOP

“Coalition In the Imaginary: A Conversation with Divya Victor” (Sanchari Sur)

Excerpt:
“In Curb, I wanted the particularities of the violence to be rooted in and anchored to location, because what I’m trying to write is a spatial theory of the nation that has been stained by blood. The coordinates pin us to the historical moment. They don’t allow us to abstract violence away from these particular bodies, these particular men who were assaulted or killed or apprehended by police. So for me, the coordinates were one way of saying, this happened here. And you are here now, and this is an act of witness.”

POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA

In Their Own Words Feature

Excerpt:
“I began to notice that these spaces of “waiting while moving” became occasions for loquaciousness, laughter, even delight, when the drivers or fellow passengers were South Asian. Within the upholstered interior of a Toyota, lit by street lights, we would tell each our stories of our loneliness in America and easefully answer the question “where are you from?” asked, for once, with warmth rather than suspicion. [...] What, I wondered, remains vast and oceanic in our small talk? What intimacies remain possible within this transactional relationship? If we can sense each other’s warmth, if we can smell the camphor and cumin on each other’s jackets, then who are we to each other?”

TUPLEO QUARTERLY | “I had to grow a new tongue,” a conversation with poet Divya Victor – curated by Mary-Kim Arnold

Excerpt:
“Between writing Kith and CURB, I had also given birth via an emergency C-section. So I came to understand, in a very bodily way, that I could no longer write from a state of injury, from a state of emergency; I had to write away from my “wounded attachments” (as Wendy Brown has put it). I had to imagine a documentary poetics that could address how my own identities were attached to my sympathetic nervous system and my sense of historical injury. How might a poetics relieve me of any kind of compulsory or coercive empathy, while also maintaining my alertness to what has and has not been documented? [...] I needed to find the forms with which I could call in my community’s fantasy that more policing keeps us safer. I needed to find forms through which I could describe how “the law” and its actual and affective apparatuses brutally alienate us from our most intimate places of self-knowing and grieving, as migrants.”

Poets.org

Featured as part of A Poetry Reading List for the 25th Anniversary of National Poetry Month

NIGHTBOAT | A Conversation With Divya Victor, Author Of Curb, And Writer Snigdha Koirala

In an interview for the Nightboat blog, poet and writer Snigdha Koirala, author of Xenoglossia, speaks with poet Divya Victor, author of Curb, about documentary poetics, the “debts and gifts” of citation, the practice of witnessing, water, and more. Take a look here!

Vagabond City

“Divya Victor’s poetry collection Curb digs into the layers of community in United States suburbia with a direct intensity that documents pervasive assaults against immigrants who settle here... We hear these stories every day, if we are listening,... Victor memorializes each loss, and grief sings through the pages.”

– Bethany Mary

Curb

Divya Victor

︎