https://divyavictorcurb.org Curb(ed) Tue, 23 Mar 2021 08:12:46 +0000 https://divyavictorcurb.org en https://divyavictorcurb.org/About-Curb Tue, 23 Mar 2021 07:34:33 +0000 Curb(ed) https://divyavictorcurb.org/About-Curb About Curb Press Eventswinner THE KINGSLEY TUFTS POETRY AWARDWINNER:  the PEN America Open Book Award Curb maps our post-9/11 political landscape by locating the wounds of domestic terrorism at unacknowledged sites of racial and religious conflict across cities and suburbs of the United States. Divya Victor documents how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living: lawns, curbs, and sidewalks undergirded by violence but also constantly repaved with new possibilities of belonging. Curb witnesses immigrant survival, familial bonds, and interracial parenting in the context of nationalist and white-supremacist violence against South Asians. The book refutes the binary of the model minority and the monstrous, dark “other” by reclaiming the throbbing, many-tongued, vermillion heart of kith. Buy it directly from Nightboat Books (and get it sooner!), Bookshop, or order it at your local bookstore.  Portions of this Curb first appeared as an artists’ book which was commissioned, designed, and printed by Aaron Cohick of The Press at Colorado College, with a Clamshell box made by Further Other Book Works. The binding is a double-sided accordion-fold spine, with sewn-in chapbooks and fold-outs. The printing incorporates a traditional, carefully crafted approach to typography and letterpress printing; a complete reversal of those traditions through repetitive overprinting; and direct rubbings made from sidewalks and curbs, which imprint the pages with a textural trace of concrete. The book measures 12.5” x 8” (closed) and 12.5” x 13’ (fully extended). Without Aaron Cohick’s CC commission, no iteration of Curb would have been possible. For more information, visit thepressatcoloradocollege.org/curb. https://divyavictorcurb.org/Divya-Victor Thu, 18 Mar 2021 09:30:59 +0000 Curb(ed) https://divyavictorcurb.org/Divya-Victor DIVYA VICTOR Divya Victor is the author of CURB  from Nightboat Books. CURB is the winner of the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the winner of the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. It was also a finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award (Poetry). She is also the author of  KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays(Merve Verlag, trans. Lena Schmidt); NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and boundary2. She was a 2023 PEN Affiliated Fellow at Civitella Ranieri and a collaborator on an Andrew Mellon Just Futures grant. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.). Her work has been performed or installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She has been an editor at Jacket2 (United States), Ethos Books (Singapore), Invisible Publishing (Canada) and Book*hug Press (Canada). Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Polish and Czech. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Writing at Michigan State University, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program. PHOTO BY HANNAH ENSOR https://divyavictorcurb.org/Karin-Aue Tue, 23 Mar 2021 07:47:03 +0000 Curb(ed) https://divyavictorcurb.org/Karin-Aue Karin Aue Bio As a creative practitioner my aim is to create unique user experiences, with the power to foster positive and sustainable change. I am a firm believer in a fundamentally human centred approach to design and art. A deep understanding of the people around you, combined with an open, multidisciplinary and iterative process allows for true innovative and impactful outcomes. Born and raised in Vienna, Austria, I moved on to live, study and work in Rotterdam, Berlin, London, Zurich and Tokyo. For several years now, I have found a base in Singapore where I am partner at a strategic design consultancy. I have been working as a designer across the globe for many internationally renowned companies and institutions such as IDEO, KesselsKramer, Tama Bi University (Tokyo) and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.), or IDEA.  As a freelance illustrator I have been able to establish a wide range of international clients including NOKIA, HP or the National University of Singapore to name just a few. I deeply enjoy what I do and thrive on the luxury to do for a living what I am passionate about.karinaue.com Works Location/Locution En Plein Air Arbor/Ardor Blood/SoilMilestones Artist Statement I deeply enjoy basing my illustrations on texts, the inspiration is concrete yet abstract, allowing me to bring to life what normally only exists in the reader’s mind. By reading and re-reading poems in Curb and focusing on certain passages I find patterns, themes and elements that stick out and strike a chord. These are the starting points of my compositions. The artwork is a mix of hand and digitally sketched illustration, combined with photograph elements and digital painting.   https://divyavictorcurb.org/Carolyn-Chen Tue, 23 Mar 2021 07:59:53 +0000 Curb(ed) https://divyavictorcurb.org/Carolyn-Chen Carolyn Chen Bio Carolyn Chen has made music for supermarket, demolition district, and the dark. Her work reconfigures the everyday to retune habits of our ears through sound, story, light, and movement. Studying the guqin, Chinese zither traditionally played for private meditation in nature, has informed her listening in social spaces. Recent projects include an audio essay on a scream and commissions for Klangforum Wien and the LA Phil. Described by The New York Times as “the evening’s most consistently alluring … a quiet but lush meditation,” her work has been presented in 25 countries and supported by the Berlin Prize, Fulbright, and ASCAP’s Fred Ho Award. Recordings and writings are available on Leonardo Music Journal, MusikTexte, Experimental Music Yearbook, and the New Centennial Review. Chen earned a Ph.D. in music from UC San Diego, and a M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature and B.A. in music from Stanford University. carolyn-chen.com Works Hedges Hedges juxtaposes the terminology of dividing national boundaries with the shock of a Cesarean birth. In the background, the poet sings a Tamil lullaby to her child, the “ari ro ari ari ari ro” quoted at the end of the poem, here incrementally harmonized at growing intervals. Frequency (Alka’s Testimony) This is a musique concrète montage assembled from snippets of foley library impact sounds and non-verbal “room sound” sections of the recording of Alka Sinha’s courtroom testimony in the sentencing of the men responsible for her husband’s death, including the voice-mail greeting of Divyendu Sinha. The assemblage finds a rhythm in these spaces between their words. Source: Alka Sinha speaks on loss of her husband, sentencing day, 10/18/2013, posted by mast radio, Oct 18, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nOioczgp1I Lawn (Arid) Lawn (Arid) is set up in a call and response song structure, with descriptors of arid lawns bouncing across the page from recollected domestic tasks and sports played in South India. In particular, tennikoit is a ring-tossing game played on a tennis-like court, with each player catching and returning the ring to the opponent’s court. Paralleling the game’s structure, I sang with my voice in a loose shadow of the poet’s, beginning each line in the same place, but often diverging in trajectory by the end of the phrase. Each call starts as a solo, but the responses accumulate in round form, each new line layering it's harmony over all of its predecessors. At the end, the whole crowd of voices plays out a few times, with different soloists moving in and out of focus. In and out of the background plays crowd response sounds from a recorded tennikoit match. Source:  “38th Senior National Tennikoit Championship 3,” posted by Indian Tennikoit, Aug 19, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LScdeVmLag0 Stoop (Damp) Stoop (Damp) contrasts scenes of Midwestern microaggressions with childhood memories in India. This assemblage contrasts a cold, wet, outside sonic space overlaid by the friction of closely roaming intervals, with a warm indoor scene lit by Zameen’s imaginative storytelling. Curb 4 Curb 4 is a grid of different shades gray – the word itself in alternate spellings, objects holding the color, and phrases describing Sunando Sen, print-shop owner and immigrant killed when he was pushed off the subway platform by a woman who told police she has hated Hindus and Muslims since 9-11. Between the poet’s utterances roars a wailing subway backed by shifting shapes of pink noise which threaten to obliterate the voice. The arrival of the train is elongated in the manner of an ever-circling sonic barber’s pole. Field recording: Subway, Maniccola, Jan.7 2013. https://freesound.org/people/Manicciola/sounds/173311/Threshold Threshold narrates a speaker’s physical reactions to hearing the news of the shooting of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, imagining the same violence enacted on her yet-to-be-born daughter. Like the speaker (and the author), I was pregnant and moving into the third trimester while making this assemblage, and integrated a recording of my own daughter's fetal heartbeat, time-stretched into “canons sung in double-time,” into the assemblage. The piano ballad in the background is a reduction of a quartet based on the same poem for loadbang ensemble. Lawn (Temperate) This poem tells a story of meeting two Bills, Susans, Phils, and Marys who fail in their attempts to pronounce the name “Divya”, whose “velvet D” holds comparison to common words in standard English. The song starts with a simple antiphony of Anglo-Saxon names uttered by Josh and Divya, steadily layering in sung versions in a seemingly endless procession. The second part offers a sung pronunciation guide to the D of Divya. Each repetition slightly tilts its timing, gradually encroaching in closeness. https://divyavictorcurb.org/Amarnath-Ravva Tue, 23 Mar 2021 08:12:46 +0000 Curb(ed) https://divyavictorcurb.org/Amarnath-Ravva AmarNath Ravva Bio Blending myth with interviews and first-person narrative, California-based writer Amarnath Ravva’s American Canyon (Kaya Press, 2015) uses prose, documentary footage and still photos to recount the fragmented and ever-evolving story of one person’s apprehension of the ghosts of history. This narrative of a son’s love for his mother and the ritual he performs for her takes us from California to Rameswaram, the southern tip of the Indian peninsula. It is a meditation on the moments in history that placed him in front of a small bright fire, a lament for the continual loss of those who, by remembering, let us know who we are. American Canyon was a finalist for the 2015 PEN USA Literary Award in Non-Fiction and the 1913 First Book Prize. He has an MFA in Creative Writing/Integrated Media from Calarts and a BA in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. He is currently working on a book about Victorian era botanical expeditions called The Glass House. amarravva.com Works Hedges Lawn (Arid) Stoop (Damp) Curb 2 Curb 4 Lawn (Temperate) ARTIST Statement Often, we attempt to place tragedy by location, by coordinates; we draw a chalk outline of our victims, we memorialize the place with photos, the flames of candles, plucked flowers. We write the history of our ‘others’; we gather what happened on that day, at that moment, at that place. We write elegies, not just for lives, but for how we have lived. What lies beyond the coordinates we choose? Is it any less tragic even if masked by the plain and necessary operations of an orderly life? I chose to gather, virtually, at the coordinates found in Curb, Google satellite imagery and video, in conversation with Divya’s poetry. https://divyavictorcurb.org/Home Thu, 18 Mar 2021 01:09:45 +0000 Curb(ed) https://divyavictorcurb.org/Home WINNERThe 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry PrizeWINNERThe 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. — Dawn Lundy Martin https://divyavictorcurb.org/Excerpt-1-Hedges Thu, 18 Mar 2021 08:14:58 +0000 Curb(ed) https://divyavictorcurb.org/Excerpt-1-Hedges first there was a sea& then there was a knot of hairfirst there was a line& then there was a story https://divyavictorcurb.org/Karin-1-Location-Locution Thu, 18 Mar 2021 08:11:18 +0000 Curb(ed) https://divyavictorcurb.org/Karin-1-Location-Locution https://divyavictorcurb.org/Carolyn-1-Hedges-and-Frequency Thu, 18 Mar 2021 01:09:45 +0000 Curb(ed) https://divyavictorcurb.org/Carolyn-1-Hedges-and-Frequency how do the dead waitin this tunnelthis tomb of book & breast patient The drone of static in a recording prior to the presence of a human voice https://divyavictorcurb.org/Amar-1-Hedges Thu, 18 Mar 2021 01:09:44 +0000 Curb(ed) https://divyavictorcurb.org/Amar-1-Hedges