Pramila Venkateswaran | March/April 2011

NOTES

In his brilliant chapter on A.K. Ramanujan's poetry, Jahan Ramazani discusses Ramanujan's poetics, his innovative use of metaphor that reveals his layered vision of east and west, and the collision of the irrecoverable past and the execrable present, thus placing this prolific poet among the greats where he rightly belongs. Ramazani's point is that Ramanujan has been underestimated in American poetry, and this virtual neglect ought not to be repeated when we look at current South Asian American poetry, or for that matter, postcolonial poetry.1 Therefore, it would be interesting to examine to what extent the immigrant theme in South Asian American poetry is merely a crutch and to what extent it becomes part of South Asian poets' deeper questions about reality, propelling their discoveries about language and self.

What Vijay Seshadri calls the "conventional immigrant narrative"2 was for poets like Chitra Divakaruni, Meena Alexander, Reetika Vazirani, and Agha Shahid Ali the stuff of their poetic impulse. It did not feel conventional to them-in fact their imagination was fired with the number of untold stories around them of migration. Of course, poetry also became the vehicle whereby they discovered their own identity in the crisis of betweenness, of racism, of marginality, and the aloneness they and the speakers in their poems faced along with other immigrants. While the older generation of poets, A.K. Ramanujan, Sharat Chandra, and Indran Amirthanayagam addressed the theme of exile, they continued to explore the themes of death, reinacarnation, nature, and violence that their Indian counterparts were writing about in a very unsentimental and ironic mode. Especially with Ramanujan, whose poems in English and his translations of classical Kannada and Tamil poetry appeared in the 1970s and '80s, the immigrant narrative was only part of the deeper questions he was asking about the self in its journey from life and death to the afterlife in the "recycling" of creation. For example, in "Elements of Composition," the opening poem in Second Sight, he lists all the biological, earthly, and sense impressions that form a human being:

I pass through them
as they pass through me
taking and leaving

affections, seeds, skeletons
...
I lose, decompose
into my elements,

into other names and forms
...

The division between self and nonself is absent and this metaphysical description leads to his punch line:

caterpillar on a leaf, eating,
being eaten.3

Ramanujan's poetry lifts the daily interactions between people and nature into a metaphysical wonderment about creation, its there-ness, its purpose. In fact, in an earlier poem, "Breaded Fish," published in his first volume, The Striders, we see how his experience of the image of breaded fish brings up another image-a dead woman half-naked on the beach "breaded by the grained indifference of sand"-and his revulsion toward the fish is parallel to the startling horror of the dead woman, both fusing into the trope of consumption! Far from being confined by place or theme, Ramanujan pays attention to the minute details of particulars, both in the present and the past; thus time and place fuse in his poems, the abstract gains clarity, and the ordinary becomes exotic. "One More on a Deathless Theme" in his posthumous volume, The Black Hen, is a perfect example. In this poem, the body is both physical and metaphysical, death is both abstract and real: "cold, dehydrate, and leave / a jawbone with half a grin." The connection between human, animal, and mineral is spoken by an orange Persian cat, "'I'm your older twin, senior / by five minutes,'" which leads to his mystical realization that the copulating praying mantis, the blue bottle, and other elements of nature he lists in the second section are engaged like him in the act of procreation and are very much part of himself.

Chitra Divakaruni and Meena Alexander came to the Indian poetry scene in the U.S. in the early '80s. In both poets, one finds that immigration as a subject yielded themes of loss, spiritual stasis, and yearning for belonging. Divakaruni's poetry avoids the danger of self-absorption by making room for other voices to enter her narrative. One hears from a woman who is about to leave her husband; a woman in Yuba City talks about discrimination she and her son face in his school; another expresses her final thought before committing suicide; we are shown the picture of the veiled bride. While some of Divakaruni's poems go beyond the merely sociological and stay with the imagination to yield a surprise or a discovery, some of them seem merely to milk the subject matter for its marketplace value-the poetizing of the veiled Muslim woman, the sati, the oppressed girl child, and the festivals-thus giving in to the exoticism of the East, which, unfortunately, is still rife in the West. Divakaruni is most successful when she gives into the voice of her character. For example, in "The Rat Trap," we are introduced to the situation of the younger sister, the speaker, watching as the elder sister's marriage proposals are refused by the brother. The poem makes a deliberate turn with the speaker trapping a rat and taking it to the pond. The final image of the rat-"the limp brown body thuds into the ash heap... The red ants swarm"-becomes startling as the speaker looks into the mirror as the elder sister combs her hair:

I press on my forehead
for luck, vermillion paste
like a coin of blood,
check my white teeth.
They look smaller, sharper, rodent-honed.
Our eyes meet, glint-black, in the smoky mirror.
Red ants swarm up my spine.4

The external image becomes inscribed into the speaker/woman, violence (blood and the red ants) blending into the apparent harmlessness of the "white teeth." The mirror reflects the reality of the sisters' transformation that perhaps they themselves are not conscious of.

We encounter such a layered rendering of voice and character more often in Meena Alexander's poems. In the vein of early South Asian immigrant writing, Alexander examines loss in the voices of characters in her adopted Manhattan who long for the Kerala air, the voices of grandmothers, and notes of Malayalam wafting through the rooms. In one of her latest books, Illiterate Heart, she continues to mine her personal journey from India to Africa to England and the United States. This book, filled with the sounds of many languages, feels more sincere, closer to the heart of what the poet wants to express, while in the earlier poems the immigration theme seemed a crutch, sometimes an obstruction to personal expression. For example, in "Port Sudan," we cannot wrest ourselves from the image of the father swinging his daughter up "and Arabic came into my mouth / and rested alongside / all my other languages."5 This early memory speaks the poet's truth that "the truth of my tongue / starts where translations perish." Also, the history of this new land becomes enmeshed with hers: the Pharoah who "loved his daughter so" as well as the earth and water, inscriptions and drawings. In "Gold Horizon," we are invited to listen to the difficulty of the immigrant's speech, which sounds like "dropped, pounding as rice grains might." The theme of the heart torn in two emerges again in the title poem: Caught between languages, it is only after years that language breaks free and "the floodwaters pour." In the tussle between the exiled language and the present hybrid self, the latter wins to speak the "mixed-up speech of newness." It is this "mixed-up" language that moves Illiterate Heart in surprising directions. Allen Ginsberg meets with Mirabai, French poems rest happily alongside Sanskrit hymns, the poet hears Rumi in Manhattan, and Greeks meet Indians. Hybridity is so much part of our existence that the poet does not make it her premeditated theme; instead, freed from the "cage of script," she discovers strange and interesting combinations of language and thought.

For the Indian American poet, while the marginal status of the immigrant can be a place of discovery, it is also a double-edged sword; as the writer's marginal status sharpens perception, it also stereotypes the writer as "immigrant" thus making him/her feel boxed in. We see recent first and second generation Indian American poets, like Vijay Seshadri, distancing themselves from the immigrant theme. On the other hand, in Reetika Vazirani's poems, the immigrant theme is in the background providing the impetus for nuanced voices and landscapes. At the same time, it is interesting to see that some poets like Ralph Nazareth, Agha Shahid Ali, and Saleem Peeradina foreground the immigrant narrative presenting its poignancies and absurdities in such complex and profound ways that it cannot be dismissed as passe.

Reetika Vazirani's poetry manages to accomplish what Chitra Divakaruni's poems could not. She uses the elements of her experience-which happen to be an Indian upbringing and immigration to the United States as a child-as a springboard to leap into the language of the poem and believe in its power to carry her to interesting places in both word and self. For example, in the sonnet sequence, "Ras Mohun," in White Elephants, she uses the biographical material, imagined or real, to leap into the here and now-the immigrant building a house hires local American contractors. Words like "Sheetrock," "hammering," "new room," "boulevards," and "drilled" describe the house and carry the emotion of the immigrant setting out roots: "home is anyplace; first hang your hat" (which recalls a Caribbean poet's line, "home is any place you hang your underwear"). Furthermore, the grounding of the sonnet allows the poet to allow language, and therefore imagination, a chance to play without getting bogged down in sociological detail. While the grandfather's life is full of history, the grandfather's house that the speaker inherits is hammered into something new, as if the workers "discovered no fresco from Pompeii / or Mohenjo-Daro": "The men took care not to smudge the panes," because "for them maybe history's a ruin."6 Much of White Elephants is amusing, startling in its juxtaposition of languages and place names, historic and personal stories. The immigrant story is a facade around which Vazirani builds, inventing newer stories, imagining her family's history, and re-inventing received stories.

While in Divakaruni's poems the emotion lies in the retelling of experience, in Vazirani's poems the emotion lies in the construction of the poetic line. As she says in her interview with Renee Shea, she took Derek Walcott's instruction that she work with the sonnet seriously. "What I learned working in the sonnet... was how flexible the line is, how spacious the shape is. That five-beat line is, I think, the length of a human breath."7 We get a full experience of the flexibility of the line in World Hotel. For example, in "Daughters in the Morning," she begins with the picture of the parents going off to a party, leaving the children holding Ayah's hand, sucking on a coated mint, which "they thought a silver bead." Morning brings the daughters to the porch where they are pictured against the "scattered light." Vazirani uses enjambment, spaces between images, and no punctuation, to show the flow between the beauty of the natural world and the children:

The wicker
scattered light under the table legs
a vase of flowers on the bed
in disarray windows strewn
across the floor and the jute mats
uncooked rice shimmering in pieces

you came to me children my jewelry
lovely to be here my body made
...8

The illusion light creates flows into the image of children as jewelry; they too are the scattered pieces of light. Such surprises are possible because of the elasticity of the line. She deftly moves it into the next line and pauses around an image only to expand it further down the stanza and shift it into the next stanza. The stressed syllables, broken sporadically with unstressed syllables, make the words gem-like and hard, the stanza tight.

Although Vazirani shapes World Hotel around the story of her mother's immigration, she goes beyond the immigrant tale to delve into the language that embodies the fragmentation of the exile. Multiple voices, broken lines of conversation-almost like long distance conversations that are cut off when phone lines go dead-mix of languages, quotes from letters and from the past that reappear, and observations in the present tense make her poems dynamic and ever-shifting. For example, in her prize-winning poem, "Daughter-Mother-Maya-Seeta," the speaker, probably the mother, widowed, moves through "the revolving door of days" and feels free and satisfied she has peopled the world with her children. But she is able to do so only after "orienting my loss of caste in a molting nation" and struggling with not being able to accept her "dark complexion." What is interesting about the poem is the surprise that Vazirani draws from the syntax. For example, in the following lines,

We have made this world
brown women
laughing till we cleared the dining table9

note the placement of "brown" at the beginning of the line; because of the lack of punctuation, it could be read as "We have made this world brown" and "women laughing..." or "We have made this world," and "brown women laughing..." In the first syntactical rendering, "brown" emerges as a surprise at the end of the sentence, as opposed to the second, rather flat, rendering.

Vazirani's wonderful sense of voice, for example, in "To Angelina from Nikos in His Old Age," is highlighted by her measured syntax. The speaker, Nikos, summarizes the scene for us:

But I thought you liked it, cheating on Niseem
...
He was loaded, I was good in bed.
You got your rich husband,
and for years my cock.10

The words are staccato, owing to the number of words that are single-stressed syllables.

And after she contrasts this with a longer line, "You fussed over the time I / sprayed your new lilac dress twice in a row," with its sensational description, she switches to Angelina's voice:

My husband, you screeched,
he will kill me he will sniff this he
will chase me out with the dog!11

Vazirani conveys the anxiety in Angelina's voice by running the pronoun "he" in the same line, beginning and ending the line without punctuation. Her punning in "You think I'll stain your reputation" and "Lina little closer," and her witty, "the Americans were just a lark, topless," and the final lines, "I, a Portuguese, wanted to claim Cervantes / so all my life I rode my horse" which underlines Nikos as an absurd Don Quixote figure, create an amusing picture of a rather banal affair. English is truly a global language in her poems-the accents, the syntactical variations, the idioms, a difficult thing to master if you are monolingual, come through with ease in the stories she tells.

While Vazirani attempts to get outside of the conventions of poetic language and explores a realm where words deliver the content of thought, Agha Shahid Ali's poems immerse themselves in metaphor and image and a turbulent ornamentation-like the mughal filigree and columns that begin with the largest structures and take one into smaller and further smaller structures within until one reaches the core. Reading his poems is like walking through one of the ancient exotic architectural feats. Indian art and music are Ali's passions, and he uses these images to get to contemporary themes. He uses traditional Indian artistic and poetic motifs in a contemporary setting with expertise and gets away with the poetic ornamentation we associate with a romantic and sentimental style.

Ali makes the history of his homeland and the reality of people's lives come alive in his invocation of Kashmir in his poems. In his ability to reach beyond the "I" and into the soul of a land, his poetry clearly outstrips the writing of other South Asian American poets. He successfully combines traditional exotic images with the reality of contemporary times. Take for instance the poem, "At the Museum" in The Country Without a Post Office. He cleverly uses the figure of the slave girl in the museum to evoke the ancient civilization that is part of his history, and lays out the social structure of Harappa. Sometimes he describes contemporary events in the language and image of traditional Urdu poetry. In the last section of "From Amherst to Kashmir," he describes the intensity of his separation from his mother who has passed away two months earlier:

Leaning against the Himalayas
...
wine glass
in hand, I see evening come on. It is
two months since you left us. So this
is separation?...12

While "the Himalayas" surprises us because of the casual demeanor of "leaning" and "wine glass," it is also a clever way of introducing the geographical location, followed by the fact of the time duration of the separation and the question that opens the way to an exploration of emotion. One of the ways in which Ali gets away with the use of the ornate is by his inventive use of syntax. For example, as he describes further the beauty of the mountains that he sees "without you," he transforms nouns into verbs, "silvers," and adjectives, "pearled," and moves into the emotional outburst that is only imagined and blurs the boundaries between the external and the internal:

...as the moon,
risen completely, silvers the world
so ruthlessly, shining on
me a terror so pearled

that How dare the moon-I want to cry out,
Mother-shine so hauntingly out
here when I have sentenced it to black waves
inside me? Why has it not perished?
How dare it shine on an earth
from which you have vanished?13

"Pearled" describing "terror" shows the speaker as exposed to unimaginable grief similar to the stark outlines lit up by the moon. The "I want to cry out" within the ellipsis stands out, revealing a sentiment that cannot be expressed, but is nevertheless expressed by the poet in italicized questions. Even here, although the interrogative form is a replication of a stylized form, the syntactical arrangement of "I have sentenced it to black waves / inside me" is powerful: the speaker/poet wants to be in control, but the emotion within is a heaving ocean. Once again he gains control only in the final lines, when the emotion returns to the stylized form.

Blending traditional and modern idioms and juxtaposing cultures are Ali's signature techniques. His use of the traditional ghazal in English, an example of this blending, is a major contribution to contemporary American poetry. His development of the ghazal is an "explosion and implosion of ideas." In "Ghazal," in Rooms Are Never Finished, he begins with a couplet full of surprises:

In Jerusalem, a dead phone's dialed by exiles.
You learn your strange fate. You were exiled by exiles.14

Opening with this punch line, there is only the task of expanding on the idea of exile by giving examples, historical and metaphysical. Then he shifts from Palestine to Kashmir-probably inspired by a print that "shawls the piano." Once he raises his wine glass, the ghazal turns to specific images of autumn, the "silk-wrapped" heart, and the final image of the "Beloved Stranger" and the exile sharing the same destiny. Not only does this poem show Ali's lyrical and formal expertise, but also his ability to lift a stale theme to a profound level: not only are we talking about not being able to go home to a physical space, but we are also witnessing "God's loneliness," a result of being exiled by his followers. This ghazal thus ends on a strange reconciliation. What emerges in Rooms are Never Finished is Ali's sense of mystical knowledge of reality; the mundane is transformed in his poems into objects of lyrical beauty, while the abstract forces of nature become everyday beings one can consort with.

Similarly, in the emerging poet Kazim Ali's The Far Mosque,15 one enters a beautiful world filled with mystical light, barely breathing in the wonder as seen through the poet's eyes, barely whispering the words, barely believing that one is actually privy to the wonders of passing moments as the poet unfolds them for us. Kazim Ali achieves lyrical delicacy both in form and content-his lines flowing effortlessly, stanzas, and sometimes lines, stopping for extended breaths (marked by extended white space) before resuming. For example, in "Renunciation," he begins with remembering Dickinson's poetry, which ironically is closer to us because of and despite her renunciation. This yearning to hear more from the one who departs from us is similar to our yearning for the Prophet who changes directions, called to the far mosque from the near one. It is this yearning we hear in Kazim Ali's poems.

Other emerging South Asian American voices like Ravi Shankar, Vijay Seshadri, and Prageeta Sharma are in the mode of pushing language to the edge, perhaps to reveal something about the times, the self or, as in Sharma's poetry, for the sake of language itself. While their poetry holds the promise of interesting form and surprises in word play, the emotion of the line that characterizes Vazirani's poetry or the fusion of the affective and the formal that dazzles in both Agha Shahid Ali and Kazim Ali's poetry is absent. Instrumentality is an academic's volume, filled with the poet's explorations of philosophy and cultural studies, except for a couple of poems that deal with travel. Shankar's most successful poem is "Exile," which stands out in terms of bringing together the emotion, the philosophical notion of the self's aloneness, and the flawless flow of the lines. The poem "Return to Mumbai," a neo-Orientalist rendering of the much written about city, which one expects might give some color to the volume, fragments under the weight of cliches. While readers like to be challenged intellectually and surprised, the poems in Sharma's The Opening Question are clunky; while the reader understands that their dissonance is deliberate, they withhold any possibility of an anchor. Newer poets, such as Bhanu Kapil, Minal Hajratwala, and Shailja Patel unfold a "pluralism of form and content" that pushes toward exciting discoveries of the self in an increasingly complex world.16

"Immigration," "exoticism," and the "representa-tion of the other" are left far behind in the poetry of Saleem Peeradina and Ralph Nazareth. While Peeradina locates himself as an Indian, Nazareth locates himself in his hybridity, a witness commenting on the march of history toward destruction. Peeradina carries the high point of Indian poetry written in English as it turned away from its colonial heritage; irony and an unsentimental realism were the hallmarks of its postcolonial vision that we see Peeradina continuing to develop in his American location.

Like his contemporaries, Arun Kolatkar and Nissim Ezekiel, Peeradina's poetry captures the life of the urban street, sometimes grim, sometimes humorous. Take for instance the poem "To Whom It May Concern," which begins with a Whitmanesque sense of self:

I am a man of the streets, a citizen of bazaars
Loitering on railway platforms, idling at bus stops.

Look for me at panikum chai shops
With autoricksha drivers, muzdoors, and bank tellers.17

This speaker, very much like the poet, who resonates with the ordinary man of the street, is uncomfortable with the hypocrisy suggested by affluence in a country where the majority is poor. While his middle class aspirations take him to the five-star hotel, he can barely deal with all the reminders of colonial culture-the costumed waiters, the expensive meal, the opulent table. Juxtaposed against the "mother's maid who can feed her family for a week with what this meal costs, we are brought face to face with the irony of modern India. In another poem, "Exhibit B," the artist, Hiroshige, while painting the beauty around him, does not enter the reality of people's lives. In the brilliant final lines of the poem, Peeradina enhances the irony in the poem:

In town,
He lingered on the bridges to hear bazaar gossip,

Got drenched in an unexpected downpour and went home
To change into a dry, silk kimono.18

The speaker's demand that art ought to express suffering-brought out in the artist's discomfort in being "drenched" in the life of the people-is Peeradina's statement about his poetics. Peeradina ironically looks at the artist's relationship to beauty and wonders in many of his poems if it exists apart from, or in, suffering.

Although a few of his poems work the immigrant narrative of difference, such as "Tips on Eating With Your Hand," by and large his poems go beyond locale to address universal ideas. Even a poem like "Field Day," which makes fun of the "singers of songs at sowing time," as seen in popular Indian films, we become attentive to the speaker's strong connectedness with the sweating humanity working the fields with hardly any recompense. Peeradina, with barely any sentimentality, exposes the stark nature of oppression that humans face. This lack of sentimentality is evident also in his love poems, for example in "Absence," where we enter the poet's void in these lines:

I move over to your side, to try on
The shape you left in the bed.19

The subject's feeling is almost always captured in the object, the result of the ironist's detachment. Peeradina's use of irony, heightened by his physical distance from the Indian subjects of many of his poems, gives his poems an intensity that emerging South Asian American writers could do well to emulate.

In South Asian American poets such as Meena Alexander and Ralph Nazareth, we continue to see the effort at decolonization that we see in Indian poetry beginning in the '70s and well into the '80s. In them not only do we hear the critique of imperialism, British or American, but we also see a poetry that has the strength of detached observation crucial to the realism in Indian poetry of the late 20th century.

In Nazareth's Ferrying Secrets,20 "you hear the matins as well as bhajans and the azan," witness the grandmother in his home in Mangalore pickling mangoes as well as the local New Yorker swearing at the liberals, and you experience cricket madness as well as soccer frenzy. Nazareth is able to achieve this fine amalgamation of images and voices through his comfort in a language he has made his own, next to his native Konkani. His English is pliant enough to evoke an American borough, a crowded Indian metropolis, and a rural area of his origin, Mangalore. East and West are no more divided and separate entities in Nazareth's world; they are part of the global metropolis that is hurrying toward a destruction," stunningly portrayed in "In the End Times," from which the poet hopes his prescience will make a few people heed the frenzy.21

Nazareth's comfort in his divided identity is revealed in poems like "Sunday Morning with Walt," where, with a Whitmanesque carte blanche, he announces at the local bagel store:

In line this Sunday morning
I celebrate myself and sing myself
and what I assume you shall assume
for every bagel that belongs to me
as well belongs to you.22

It is this sense of oneness with the universe, expressed tongue-in-cheek, that challenges the old assimilationist desire of an "English only" culture that wishes to "erase them all" for a "taste homogenous."

Nazareth's volume is testimony to his defense of not just hybrid American identity but also the singularity of voice-"the salt of your words, the silt of her speech"-that writers strive for. "In it one hears this poet's voice that has absorbed the traditions of Indian literature, the native idioms of Catholic culture, English literary tradition, as well as the literature and culture of the United States-the secrets that the poet has ferried across and planted in the home of his imagination."23 Nazareth's poems work the middle ground where life in its ugliness and beauty exists in its unrelenting reality, leaning to neither of the two extremes-the poetry heavy with irony bereft of the maudlin sentimentality of exilic writing.

While their unique voices ring out in the universal poetry marketplace regardless of place and time, South Asian poets in the United States feel the public pressure to sound different, exotic. But the public itself is perhaps saturated with the exotic as presented in the burgeoning mass media, which gives the poet the opportunity to stay true to his or her calling. We already see the "ethnic" poem in many journals and anthologies placed next to "European" and "American" poems, the terms themselves a blending of ethnicities.

Indian American poetry today looks back not only at both the Indian and the American past, but also to the swiftly-changing present in America and globally. For example, in Vijay Seshadri's prose piece in The Long Meadow,24 he analyzes his relationship with his father and his father's relationship to his adopted country by looking at the father's passion for American history. Looking at the American past through his father's eyes helps Seshadri move beyond the immigrant narrative and roam the imagination without the burdens of the immigrant writer. This "burdensomeness" of the immigrant we see in Meena Alexander working out in her poetry the violence of colonization and the aftermath of independence-the violence of uprooting oneself again and again, physically and in language. How much can one bear fragmentation, she seems to ask in volume after volume. Alexander, like Nazareth, writes in the "new republic," a place of "gashed remembrance" made possible by Gandhiji's dream of a republic and the civil disobedience of the growers of indigo ("Diary of Dreams" in Illiterate Heart). While the expression in this poem preserves the postcolonial spirit of critiquing imperialism, being placed in the "new republic" also gives an ironic distance to the past, and the knowledge of the past gives the vision of how the present moments of imperialism and freedom are being played out on the world's stage, as seen currently in the poems of Alexander, Peeradina, and Nazareth.

AWP

Pramila Venkateswaran is the author of three books of poetry: Thirtha (Yuganta Press, 2002), Behind Dark Waters (Plain View Press, 2008), and Draw Me Inmost (Stockport Flats, 2009). An award-winning poet, she has performed her poems internationally, most recently in the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Her essays and reviews have appeared in several journals. She is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Nassau.

1. Ramazani, Jahan. The Hybrid Muse. Postcolonial Poetry in English. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

2. Poets and Writers. "Seshadri, Vijay. Interview." Poets and Writers. www.pw.org/dq_seshadri.htm.
3. Ramanujan, A.K. The Collected Poems. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995).
4. Divakaruni, Chitra. Black Candle. (Oregon: Calyx Books, 2000).
5. Alexander, Meena. Illiterate Heart. (Illinois: Triquarterly Books, 2002).
6. Vazirani, Reetika. White Elephants. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
7. Vazirani, Reetika. Interview. Poets and Writers. January 2003.
8. Vazirani. Reetika. World Hotel. (New York: Copper Canyon Press, 2003).
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ali, Agha Shahid. The Country without a Post Office. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).
13. Ibid.
14. Ali, Agha Shahid. Rooms are Never Finished. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002).
15. Ali, Kazim. The Far Mosque. (Alice James Books, 2005).
16. Banerjee, Neelanjana, Summi Kaipa, and Pireeni Sundaralingam. Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. (Fayetville: University of Arkansas Press, 2010).
17. Peeradina, Saleem. Slow Dance. (Ridgeway Press, 2010).
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Nazareth, Ralph. Ferrying Secrets. (Hyderabad: Yugadi Press, 2005).
21. Venkateswaran, Pramila. "Docking After an Amazing Ride." Review of Ferrying Secrets, by Ralph Nazareth, Kavya Bharati, 2006, 167-171.
22. Nazareth, Ralph. Ferrying Secrets. (Hyderabad: Yugadi Press, 2005).
23. Venkateswaran, Pramila. "Docking After an Amazing Ride." Review of Ferrying Secrets, by Ralph Nazareth, Kavya Bharati, 2006, 167-171.
24. Seshadri, Vijay. The Long Meadow. (New York: Graywolf Press, 2002).