Meena Alexander > Quotes

“The act of writing, it seems to me, makes up a shelter, allows space to what would otherwise be hidden, crossed out, mutilated. Sometimes writing can work toward a reparation, making a sheltering space for the mind. Yet it feeds off ruptures, tears in what might otherwise seem a seamless, oppressive fabric.”
― Meena Alexander, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience

“I see his eyes where petals part
tired, remote, another coast.”
― Meena Alexander, House of a Thousand Doors

“In the poem, there is always that present moment which is terribly important through which memory works.”
― Meena Alexander

“She reaches out her hand, plucks the boy’s beating heart, and, weeping, eats it.”
― Meena Alexander, Quickly Changing River: Poems

“Trees have no elsewhere.”
― Meena Alexander, Birthplace with Buried Stones: Poems

“And in terms of identity, surely one could argue versions of such a crisis have been with us for a very long time. There is nothing new in exile. It is as ancient as the notion of home.”
― Meena Alexander, Poetics of Dislocation

“In order to enter that zone we must finally let go of the embodied distances that place grants. But what does this do to what we commonly think of as the past?

I think of cyberspace, which is no place at all, as akin to the dark imaginary out of which poems come, their rhythms, their discrete music punctuating the inner life.”
― Meena Alexander, Poetics of Dislocation