Sets the work of contemporary American poetry within the streams of migration that have made the nation what it is in the 21st century. This book outlines the dilemmas that face modern immigrant poets, including how to make a place for oneself in a new society and how to write poetry in a time of violence worldwide.

"With their intense lyricism, Meena Alexander's poems convey the fragmented experience of the traveler, for whom home is both everywhere and nowhere. The landscapes she evokes, whether walking a city street or reading Bashō in the Himalayas, hold echoes of otherness. Place becomes a palimpsest, composed of layer upon layer of memory, dream, and desire. There are poems of love and poems of war, the rippling effects of violence and dislocation, of love and its aftermath. The poems in Birthplace with Buried Stones range widely over time and place, from Alexander's native India to New York City. Uniquely attuned to life in a globalized world, Alexander's poetry is an apt guide, bringing us face to face with the power of a single moment and its capacity to evoke the unseen and unheard." -- back cover.

Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander is a unique compendium of scholarship on South Asian American writer Meena Alexander, who is recognized as one of the most influential and innovative contemporary South Asian American poets. Her poetry, memoirs, and fiction occupy a unique locus at the intersection of postcolonial and US multicultural studies. This anthology examines the importance of her contribution to both fields. It is the first sustained analysis of the entire Alexander oeuvre, employing a diverse array of critical methodologies. Drawing on feminist, Marxist, cultural studies, trauma studies, contemporary poetics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, the collection features fifteen chapters and an Afterword, by well-established scholars of postcolonial and Asian American literature like Roshni Rustomji, May Joseph, Anindyo Roy, and Amritjit Singh, as well as by emerging scholars like Ronaldo Wilson, Parvinder Mehta, and Kazim Ali. The contributors offer insights on nearly all of Alexander’s major works, and the volume achieves a balance between Alexander’s diverse genres, covering the spectrum from early works like Nampally Road to her forthcoming book The Poetics of Dislocation. The essays engage with a variety of debates in postcolonial, feminist, and US multicultural studies, as well as providing many nuanced and detailed readings of Alexander’s mutli-layered texts.

In this evocative memoir, an acclaimed Indian poet explores writing, memory, and place in a post-9/11 world. Passionate, fierce, and lyrical, Fault Lines follows one woman’s evolution as a writer at home—and in exile—across continents and cultures. Meena Alexander was born into a privileged childhood in India and grew into a turbulent adolescence in the Sudan, before moving to England and then New York City. With poetic insight and devastating honesty, Alexander explores how trauma and recovery shaped the entire landscape of her memory: of her family, her writing process, and her very self. This new edition, published on the two-year anniversary of Alexander's passing in 2018, will feature a commemorative afterword celebrating her legacy. "Alexander's writing is imbued with a poetic grace shot through with an inner violence, like a shimmering piece of two-toned silk." —Ms. Magazine "Evocative and moving." —Publishers Weekly “One of the most important literary voices in South Asian American writing and American letters broadly writ, Meena Alexander’s close examination of exile and migration lays bare the heart of a poet.” —Rajiv Mohabir, author of The Cowherd’s Son

The author describes his life-long fascination with Canada, describing his time spent living in British Columbia; the stories of mining, pioneer life, and cannibalism he uncovered in his travels; and his experiences with border crossings.

For more than forty years, Chicana author Ana Castillo has produced novels, poems, and critical essays that forge connections between generations; challenge borders around race, gender, and sexuality; and critically engage transnational issues of space, identity, and belonging. Her contributions to Latinx cultural production and to Chicana feminist thought have transcended and contributed to feminist praxis, ethnic literature, and border studies throughout the Americas. Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo is the first edited collection that focuses on Castillo’s oeuvre, which directly confronts what happens in response to cultural displacement, mixing, and border crossing. Divided into five sections, this collection thinks about Castillo’s poetics, language, and form, as well as thematic issues such as borders, immigration, gender, sexuality, and transnational feminism. From her first political poetry, Otro Canto, published in 1977, to her mainstream novels such as The Mixquiahuala Letters, So Far From God, and The Guardians, this collection aims to unravel how Castillo’s writing impacts people of color around the globe and works in solidarity with other third world feminisms.

Renos K. Papadopoulos clearly and sensitively explores the experiences of people who reluctantly abandon their homes, searching for safer lives elsewhere, and provides a detailed guide to the complex experiences of involuntary dislocation. Involuntary Dislocation: Home, Trauma, Resilience, and Adversity-Activated Development identifies involuntary dislocation as a distinct phenomenon, challenging existing assumptions and established positions, and explores its linguistic, historical, and cultural contexts. Papadopoulos elaborates on key themes including home, identity, nostalgic disorientation, the victim, and trauma, providing an in-depth understanding of each contributing factor whilst emphasising the human experience throughout. The book concludes by articulating an approach to conceptualising and working with people who have experienced adversities engendered by involuntary dislocation, and with a reflection on the language of repair and renewal. Involuntary Dislocation will be a compassionate and comprehensive guide for psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, counsellors, and other professionals working with people who have experienced displacement. It will also be important reading for anyone wishing to understand the psychosocial impact of extreme adversity.