Victor, Divya: Kith

Fence Books, paperback

Publication Date: December 12, 2017

Publisher Marketing: 

A complex and moving array of imagistic arguments-with-history about skin, postcolonialism, travel, exile, fluids, and cultural materialism.

Kith describes postcolonialist relation from the painful psychohistorical perspective of a hybrid, in multiple exiles. Victor reaps the pain, reams the pain, approaches the painful material from striated vantages, using discrete methodologies of extraction. This is not a pretty poetry of nostalgia for bittersweet pungencies, no invitation to savor bemusing exoticisms; this poetry invites disassociation from that which is no longer to be borne.

From "Dromomania"

in one such case a woman embroidering the name of her fourth child into the mantelpiece tapestry was called by her husband to suckle oil from the Persian gulf in a city that clotted around a oasis where centuries ago star crossed lovers failed each other-- Layla and Majnun: she dying in waiting, he walking miles and kissing every wall to know if she lived behind it-- and from which she would return without her hair and with a spool of thread to spell again

-- later this story was told to children in a kitchen while
smoothing the ruffled mackerel gills and sharpening knives on grey slabs
of granite drawn from a quarry where men had fallen over and over in love
with their own destinies