Kith

by Divya Victor

A complex and moving array of imagistic arguments-with-history about skin, postcolonialism, travel, exile, fluids, and cultural materialism.

Kith describes postcolonialist relation from the painful psychohistorical perspective of a hybrid, in multiple exiles. Victor reaps the pain, reams the pain, approaches the painful material from striated vantages, using discrete methodologies of extraction. This is not a pretty poetry of nostalgia for bittersweet pungencies, no invitation to savor bemusing exoticisms; this poetry invites disassociation from that which is no longer to be borne.

From “Dromomania”:

in one such case a woman embroidering the name of her fourth child into the mantelpiece tapestry was called by her husband to suckle oil from the Persian gulf in a city that clotted around a oasis where centuries ago star crossed lovers failed each other— Layla and Majnun: she dying in waiting, he walking miles and kissing every wall to know if she lived behind it— and from which she would return without her hair and with a spool of thread to spell again

— later this story was told to children in a kitchen while
smoothing the ruffled mackerel gills and sharpening knives on grey slabs
of granite drawn from a quarry where men had fallen over and over in love
with their own destinies

Genres: Poetry

220 pages, ebook

First published September 27, 2017

About the author

Divya Victor is the author of Natural Subjects (Trembling Pillow, 2014, winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), UNSUB (Insert Blanc, 2015), Things to Do with Your Mouth (Les Figues, 2014), Swift Taxidermies 1919–1922 (GaussPDF, 2014), Goodbye John! On John Baldessari (GaussPDF, 2012), PUNCH (GaussPDF, 2011), and the Partial trilogy (Troll Thread, 2011-2012). Her chapbooks include Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place (2011) and SUTURES (2009). Her criticism and commentary have appeared in Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Jacket2, and the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet. Her work has been collected in the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, the reedition of bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, Hobo, VLAK, The Best American Experimental Writing, and boundary2, among other venues. Her poetry has been translated into French and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Mandeville Poetry Collections at University of California San Diego, and a writer in residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (LACE). She lives in the United States and Singapore, where she is assistant professor of poetry and writing at Nanyang Technological University.

Reviews

[Mike Good · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book might risk obscurity as it blurs genre, its author is maybe not tremendously well-known (yet), and it appears lengthy, but I found KITH to be really excellent. a sort of tour de force in dominant essayistic and poetic modes--reminiscent of WG Sebald and others.

[navu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd forgotten that diaspora poetry doesn't have to be insincere and politically hollow? anyway thank u divya victor, this book is the antidote to rupi kaur et al

[Samidha; समिधा · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars
Loved it, but wish that some parts were a bit less post modern-y!

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

"SECOND ATTEMPT: TO COLLECT ALL MY MOLES TO MAKE A MOLEHILL ON NO MAN'S LAND"

"... I take this letter opener and slip its tip under the corner of my eye where my first mole sits like a grain of dark gram or a long lentil sheltered by lashes and behind glasses | I take that letter opener to snap it up from my skin like a red waxen seal pressed on my eye as viscous black bitumen or the pus-beige of beeswax colored with vermilion doused in shellac bathed in turpentine and pressed onto the corner of my eye with a signet ring worn on the wrinkled knuckles of some so-and-so and so I slip the ivory sliver under the mole to split it from my skin and open this envelope..."

[Isabella · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were a number of poems I bookmarked that were really powerful and beautiful. There were also a number of poems that I just couldn’t wrap my head around due to the writing style—I think a fellow reviewer called these too “post-moderny.” I never expect to understand every poem in a collection, but it happened more than usual in the first half of this book. However, I’d still recommend the book, because you’re bound to find at least a couple poems in here that speak to you and expand your perspective.

[Jillian · Rating 5 out of 5]

An impressive and gorgeously constructed poetry collection, Victor delves into the intersection of place and migration on family and the self. She makes no apologies for being nostalgic. In fact it is in those details of home and childhood, her own and 'Kith's', where the language is at its finest.

[Vahni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal! If you're South Indian/Indian-American, you absolutely have to read this, and if you're not, you still do.

[Patrick Al-de Lange · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bundle of poetry that often doesn't look like poetry, most of it is prose poetry but you can't evade it touching you with its raw emotion and honest portay