Invitation
Meena Alexander
Press Release
Photos
Reviews |
| Meena Alexander’s Quickly Changing River: book launch: February 29, 2008 |
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February 29, Friday
Meena Alexander: Quickly Changing River
Reading and discussion moderated by Sukhdev Sandhu
Kimmel Center for University Life
60 Washington Square South, 4th Floor
Rooms 405-406 7-9pm
RSVP by February 27, Wednesday to apa.rsvp@nyu.edu or 212-992-9653.
For more information or to rsvp online, visit www.apa.nyu.edu.
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With her strong voice and precise language, Meena Alexander has crafted this visceral, worldly collection of poems. The experience she brings to the reader is sensual in many senses of the word, as she invokes bright colors, sounds, smells, and feelings. Her use of vivid imagery from the natural world—birds, lilies, horses—up against that from the world of humans—oppression, slavery, and violence—ties her work to the earth even as she works a few mystical poetic transformations. In Alexander’s world, the songs of a bird can become the voice of a girl in a café and the red juice of mulberries can be as shocking as blood. When she focuses her attention on the cloth of a girl’s sari, the material of a woman’s life, or the blood in her veins, she speaks to the particular experience of women in the world. The women are vividly present—sometimes they are hidden or veiled, juxtaposed with open gardens in full bloom. It is difficult not to come away from Quickly Changing River without a new sense of the power and frailty of being alive.
Join author Meena Alexander for a reading of her poetry and a candid conversation with moderator Sukhdev Sandhu, Associate Professor of A/P/A Studies and English at NYU.
 Meena Alexander, Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Raw Silk and Illiterate Heart, winner of the 2002 PEN Open Book Award. Her memoir Fault Lines was one of Publishers Weekly's best books of 1993,
and her novel Nampally Road was a 1991 Voice Literary Supplement Editor's Choice.
Book Description:
With her strong voice and precise language, Meena Alexander has crafted this visceral, worldly collection of poems. The experience she brings to the reader is sensual in many senses of the word, as she invokes bright colors, sounds, smells, and feelings. Her use of vivid imagery from the
natural worldbirds, lilies, horsesup against that fromthe world of humansoppression, slavery, and violenceties her work to the earth even as she works a few mystical poetic transformations.
In Alexander’s world, the songs of a bird can become the voice of a girl in a café and the red juice of mulberries can be as shocking as blood. When she focuses her attention on the cloth of a girl’s sari, the material of a woman’s life, or the blood in her veins, she speaks to the particular experience of women in the world. The women are vividly presentsometimes they are hidden or veiled, juxtaposed with open gardens in full bloom. It is difficult not to come away from Quickly Changing River without a new sense of the power and frailty of being alive.
Praise for Meena Alexander:
"These are poems of rich and satisfying detail-- gingko trees and water taxis, the pearly feathers of pigeons. But the real strength of this book goes far beyond detail, however lyrically rendered. These poems are a sustained elegy for homelessness, for the displacement at the heart of human life. Meena Alexander is an eloquent and ambitious poet." -- Eavan Boland
"Quickly Changing River is an alluvial force of surprises reaching near and far, always beckoning us closer and closer to its urgent and magical source. From the collection's first poem to its last, 'Cosmopolitan' to 'August 14, 2004,' there's a movement here that challenges and enchants. Meena Alexander is a truth-teller who knows how to make language do anything and everything she desires." --Yusef Komunyakaa |
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