CURB

The lush, slightly off-center diction in Divya Victor’s CURB is immediately striking. In a poem set in a consulate, we read that “they first lift / serosa from serosa.” Later, we learn how “to pleach a tree,” and to distinguish between “aloe, an organ; saffron, an ovary.” This sparkling lyricism helps orientate us as we navigate and attempt to cross the book’s multiple thresholds. Liminal pavements, streets, and suburban houses become unsettled and reterritorialized as the immigrant is transformed from invasive alien into resident citizen; within these boundaries, the curb acts as a grid for the disciplined brutality of whiteness targeting Brown and Black bodies, wherever the “wedging body creates a space, insisting on mattering.”

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. This care is also what animates lines like “how long, chetaa, / have we been here / before we arrived?” from a sequence on South Asian Uber drivers, and “the percussive hinder, the fescues / of coriander, thunder / haitch, haitch, haitch / turns the lathe with each exhale,” from a poem on language assimilation. At 176 pages, CURB is expansive in its scope, even as Victor makes clear that there is still more to be said and done in order to reclaim the curb as a horizon of refuge, community, and solidarity.