Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

Editors’ Preface

Editors’ Preface Indivisible is the first anthology to showcase American poets whose ancestral roots lie in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The shape of the current book grew and metamorphosed over several years after we were approached by the literary publicist Kim McMillon. Kim originally suggested that we compile a short selection of local South Asian American poets, as a response to the fact that many of these voices had been diminished by the tide of anti-Muslim and xenophobic sentiment arising after the attacks of September 11, 2001. As we started work, we quickly realized that we needed to broaden the scope of the book. At the time, there was no single volume that included a comprehensive range of South Asian American poets. While there were a few mixed-genre anthologies, these collections were over ten years old and could not possibly reflect the sociopolitical climate of the United States in the twenty- first century. Furthermore, many of those older anthologies grouped together works from both Canadian and U.S. writers. Yet the political fallout from the terrorist attacks of 2001 had made life on the two sides of the Canadian-U.S. border quite distinct, particularly for those of South Asian descent. The fact that there was no coherent collection of such poets was all the more surprising given the contemporary boom in South Asian and South Asian American fiction. In recent years, such fiction has become extremely popular, with Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni becoming best-selling authors. We felt it was crucial to complement this success by bringing attention to the many remarkable voices of South Asian American poetry. Moreover, it was apparent that the number and strength of South Asian American poets had developed a critical momentum. It seemed a perfect time to gather together these writers and promote a dialogue among them. Consequently , we chose to focus on those poets who write and publish in English and who are actively engaged in the world of American literature. Regrettably, the limitations of the printed form mean that we were unable to include many of the fine writers working in the fields of multimedia and performance poetry, although we have included representative texts by artists such as Ravi Chandra, Sachin B. Patel, and Shailja Patel, whose work can cross from performance to text. xv Indivisible brings together forty-nine poets, including long-established writers like Agha Shahid Ali, Vijay Seshadri, and Meena Alexander and dozens of younger award winners such as Ravi Shankar (the winner of the 2009 National Poetry Review Book Prize), Srikanth Reddy (the winner of an Asian American Literary Award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop ), Maya Khosla (the winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize), Monica Ferrell (the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry), and Aimee Nezhukumatathil (the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry). In addition, we are delighted that our faith in our emerging writers has been shown to be well placed; during the time it has taken to bring this manuscript to publication, they have developed their writing , deepened their authorial voices, and built their publication histories. Given the significant and growing body of work by South Asian American poets, we felt it was important to showcase these writers on an individual basis, in order to allow readers to gain a more complex appreciation of the aesthetics, concerns, and distinct contributions of each poet. In doing so, we also wished to move beyond the thematic layout favored by many recent ethnic anthologies, which often imposes academic categorizations on writers’ work. Such themes seem all the more problematic given that poetry has multiple and shifting meanings and that poems lose something essential when they are divided up and pinned down according to thematic classifications. In considering how to order the poets within the book, we were concerned that by listing poets chronologically (according to date of birth), or by grouping them according to their country of ancestry or region of current residence , we would only serve to divide the anthology—and our poets—into superficial groupings; much of the exciting resonances between poets would be lost. Instead, we chose to arrange the work of our contributors back-toback , challenging ourselves to find new and surprising connections in their writing. As a result, established poets rub shoulders with emerging writers, and experimental structures follow traditional forms. For example, while Sudeep Sen...