{"title":"Divya Victor","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"kith-book-divya-victor-9781934200575","title":"Kith","description":"Poetry. Asian \u0026amp; Asian American Studies. In KITH, award-winning writer Divya Victor engages Indian-American diasporic culture in the twentieth century, via an autobiographical account that explores what 'KITH' might mean outside of the national boundaries of those people belonging to the Indian and Southeast Asian diasporas. Through an engagement with the effects of globalization on identity formation, cultural and linguistic exchange, and demographic difference, Kith explores questions about race and ethnic difference: How do 'brownness' and 'blackness' emerge as traded commodities in the transactions of globalization? What are the symptoms of belonging? How and why does 'kith' diverge from 'kin, ' and what are the affects and politics of this divergence? Historically-placed and well-researched, KITH is an unflinching and simultaneous account of both systemic and interpersonal forms of violence and wounding in the world today. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e For Divya Victor, history is a wound. And the poet's language is bright like the white bandage on which blood shows more clearly. What we have on display in this book is an imagination that is as wide as the world. Part-anthem, part-instruction manual, part-memoir, part-dictionary, this text offers testimony to other ways of being and remembering, a reflection on forgotten lives. I read most of KITH in airplanes and airports, and found myself paying greater attention to everyone around me. I was grateful for Victor's long sentences that spilled into seemingly every corner of our contemporary reality--these sentences that describe so well our locked destinies and, at the same time, perhaps because of their wit, or vitality, or compassion, deliver us into liberated zones of heightened consciousness.--Amitava Kumar \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e KITH is a luminous work of 'Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering, ' as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha might say, the dead flittering out of her thrifted coats with kith in their mouths. Kith, like neighbor, friend, enemy, or community, is a kind of conceptual limit, 'not of blood and yet belonging'; not kin, which it is often confused with, but kindred, kinship, and also knowledge. Yet in KITH, it turns out that kith is also kin and kin is also kith and the neighbor is also friend, enemy, and the other neighbor's neighbor, and 'we' are all stuck here at the limits of language grasping for new forms of community and belonging when those words suck too yet refuse to burn. Lodged within this 'atlas of mangle' known as now-time is something at the helm of being named— KITH's offering, KITH's knowledge, KITH's open boat, KITH's astounding 'shriek frightful.' Where were you when it will happen?--Rachel Zolf \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e A keen shriek for stricken kin, Kith pierced me. Divya Victor's concentrated anger and t(h)rilling intelligence reverberate through these poems, essays, pronunciation exercises, and grim primers. This monumental work shifts shapes, not for virtuosity's sake--though virtuosic it is--but as one takes up an array of instruments for an intricate undertaking. Quandary: How not to 'become a jingle of anklets' the colonizer desires? Perhaps by being a jangle of them. Kith is that dissonance composed; it sounds bitter, tender, and utterly necessary.--Douglas Kearney","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49592517198097,"sku":"GOR013520320","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50478167916817,"sku":"CIN1934200573VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51057427972369,"sku":"NIN9781934200575","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51227483242769,"sku":"GOR014203006","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52624937779473,"sku":"GOR014566784","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1934200573.jpg?v=1750997451"},{"product_id":"curb-book-divya-victor-9781643620701","title":"CURB","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50284059820305,"sku":"CIN1643620703VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51043873980689,"sku":"NIN9781643620701","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52107255349521,"sku":"CIN1643620703G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52425142927633,"sku":"NLS9781643620701","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1643620703.jpg?v=1751089305"},{"product_id":"natural-subjects-book-divya-victor-9780988725775","title":"Natural Subjects","description":"Poetry. Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Divya Victor's NATURAL SUBJECTS, a tough-minded, audaciously structured, \u0026amp; subtly open- ended poem, closes in on the naturalization process by locating the small but bureaucratically nebulous frame of the passport photo and opening up the multi- layered points of stress and dislocated violence that frame marks. But that only gets at a little bit of what NATURAL SUBJECTS does. I register things like an offhand cubist tonality, a witty examination of scale, a spin of the frame to let character- versions of Eliza Doolittle, Hedda Gabbler, and fra lein Maria in, and the shaping of poetic material that comes from many sources without leaning on them. Nothing is telegraphed. The book keeps opening each time I pass through.--Anselm Berrigan\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 'May I see your passport, please?' What are you a citizen of? What subject to? Are you natural or naturalized? What have you sworn to and will you tell true? Divya Victor, true to form in wit and poetic acuteness, has made a book about nations, nationality, and their notions by showing documents, facts, fictional and real heroines, instructions for assembly, and lyric lists that makes readers acknowledge their own disassembly, distribution, and\/ or dispersal in an on-going diaspora. This acute work by Victor teases civic ideologies in all their motley, pervasive constructions by writing from multiple subjectivities and engineering defiance, struggles with agency, language play, appropriated commentaries, and revelations of loss. A multi-faceted book of high interest.--Rachel Blau DuPlessis\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e A mandala of homeland motifs and constellations that are numbered but not named bursts, at the start of Divya Victor's strangely painful and real new book, to reveal: talons, attempts, a 'pose.' These initiating frames take us through a naturalization process--from the gathering of biometric data to the duplex-pomegranate-linoleum reverie of the pledge ceremony itself. Questions of 'exit' and 'enunciation' accrue a 'blunt hum' as the book progresses. Lit from within by an 'opal glass shade' or the 'violent and excited' intake. Yet never clarified. Here, for example, is Dimple Kapadia, taking the stage like late onset 'logopoeia.' Are you a 'great scholar'? Are you a 'lover'? Did you make your home in the trampled lot behind the Edison IKEA? Did you 'maybe write things'? Victor has written a book that is both heart-breaking and a brilliant, effervescent and dark joke.--Bhanu Kapil","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50377423880465,"sku":"CIN0988725770G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0988725770.jpg?v=1751203908"},{"product_id":"things-to-do-with-your-mouth-book-divya-victor-9781934254523","title":"Things to Do with Your Mouth","description":"Poetry. Asian \u0026amp; Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Attempts to control the mouths of speaking women--17th century witches, 19th century hysterics--have taken many forms, both physical and metaphorical. In THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH, Divya Victor repeats, recants, and relentlessly echoes a textual meeting place for the psychic and corporeal implications of this fear of women with excessive powers of speech and discourse, creating a cacophonous movement towards the feminist purpose of poetics. Culling language from texts as diverse as nursery rhymes and contemporary pediatric health websites, the biblical Song of Solomon and Freud's Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Victor confronts this long history of the silenced mouth. Section by section, appropriated word by appropriated word, Victor relishes in the buccal opening, its capacity for words and discourse, addressing Nietzsche's claim that the world lives on itself: its excrements are its nourishment. These words will eat you alive, digest you, leave you scattered. Or, as CA Conrad states in his afterword, these reutterances will ultimately liberate us one cough at a time. The mouth in, the mouth out, mouths training mouths around the always-imperfect O.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50765187350801,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50765190463761,"sku":"CIN1934254525G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1934254525.jpg?v=1751156699"},{"product_id":"unsub-book-divya-victor-9780991109272","title":"Unsub","description":"Recasting the forensic and everyday language of the FBI's descriptions of unidentified subjects, from suspects to criminals to corpses, UNSUB probes what it is to be wanted. It explores our desire to have and to hold in contempt those subjects that threaten a society of securitization. Investigating a culture of terrorism, paranoia, and surveillance by rendering a world divided into victims and perpetrators, UNSUB plays on the differences between catching a predator and being a catch. Through ghostly descriptions of live bodies, the book scrutinizes the vicissitudes of anonymity and subjectivity, indistinction and identity. By turning the forensic onto the forensic, Divya Victor splays the bodies of those wanted into bits of want: soldered-over scars and moulding desires, that glut of gut tissue and the rotting tongue's ability to speak another tongue. To UNSUB is not, as turns out, to unsubjectify, but to subjectify too highly. High as how meat goes when left too long by the side of the road. Like a graveyard, the poems make a more permanent point than its peoples: What we want is enough. And always too much.-Vanessa Place This is a work under the auspices of resemblances, the unknown subject, the step just beyond, or under. In Atom Egoyan's Next of Kin, hoards of narrative are sapped into wasp facial features. In UNSUB, Divya Victor shows us how these narratives get charged by ethnicity, a place, a thievery and a poverty of emigrations, migrations now virtual. We are fluttered by identifiers, yes, we are, leaving us still, too often, facing losses. I just checked, poetry is still alive.-Ara Shirinyan","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51010994929937,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51010997846289,"sku":"NIN9780991109272","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52337104978193,"sku":"NLS9780991109272","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0991109279.jpg?v=1750884658"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-divya-victor.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}