Curb maps our post-9/11 political landscape by locating the wounds of domestic terrorism at unacknowledged sites of racial and religious conflict across cities and suburbs of the United States.
Like blood blooming from that open wound, Victor's words spill onto page after page with an unstanchable urgency ... Victor's painfully vivid and sharp fragments of prose and poetry are loaded with kinesthetic and synesthetic images as well as multilingual alliterations and repetitions ... The carefully-constructed white spaces on Victor's pages are not merely aesthetic flourishes but much-needed pauses to allow the language, emotions, and thoughts to flow into us and pool in those places that 24/7 news and social media have left numb ... This book is not only for South Asians or immigrants. The treasure trove of metaphorical, literary, and cultural symbols and allusions goes beyond South Asia and America. Victor, a professor of creative writing and transnational poetry and poetics, brings together rich strands from other geographies, mythologies, and timespaces too. In doing so, she helps us all recontextualize, reconstruct, and recharge our own memories. Her goal is to have us interrogate what we remember, feel, think, and know about South Asia's place in the world, its immigrant diaspora, and the losses of these five men in particular ... Curb is more than a personal poetics of loss and identity. It is even more than a well-written eulogy of five murdered South Asian Americans. It is a profound act of poetic debridement for the South Asian American diaspora, and an insistent plea to resist erasure by first acknowledging, absorbing, processing, and remembering our own communal histories.
The reader, in engaging with the coordinates, becomes more than just a passive consumer of these poems; they take an active part in learning more about what the poems are trying to accomplish ... highlights an ongoing injustice in this country: that the only thing that connects an immigrant to the American land after their death (or murder) will be a 'written/ . . . scrap tied to a place / which holds your feet / to the ground.' Victor’s collection is thus a must-read, in its offering of a moving critique of the South Asian immigrant experience within post 9/11 America.
This intensely multitudinous collection reflects the poet’s heritage ... This is an incredibly well-crafted collection by a globally minded, locally rooted, exceedingly brilliant poet.
