Curb

by Divya Victor

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.

Divya Victor documents how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living: lawns, curbs, and sidewalks undergirded by violence but also constantly repaved with new possibilities of belonging. Curb witnesses immigrant survival, familial bonds, and interracial parenting in the context of nationalist and white-supremacist violence against South Asians. The book refutes the binary of the model minority and the monstrous, dark “other” by reclaiming the throbbing, many-tongued, vermillion heart of kith.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published April 27, 2021

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

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry is a powerful tool that can bear witness, function like a eulogy, and can become a space for collective grief. Winner of the PEN Open Book Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Curb from poet Divya Victor creates such a space as Victor addresses racism against South Asians in America and the violence that it ignites. This book arrived as warnings of a rising wave of violence against Asians reached all our news feeds, and Curb documents not only the rise in violence against South Asians that skyrocketed following 9/11 but also the spaces which contained the violence and the empty spaces these acts left behind. Victor dog-ears pages with GPS coordinates that point to the location of the violent events discussed in her poems, one of the many ways this book reaches out from the page and into the world. With an incredible digital strategy from powerful video accompaniments, an interactive website and even a limited run of a dynamic “artists book” edition designed by artist Aaron Cohick, Victor has collaborated with many brilliant artists to in ways that highly enhance the reading experience and allow the reader to enter the poems in dynamic ways. Curb is a moving experience that serves as a memorial as well as a condemnation of nationalist violence, addressing grief, colonialism, and asking what space people can have if they are Othered in their own neighborhoods.

The book opens with a statement from the poet’s mother:
‘yes; I am // afraid all // the time; all // the places are all // the same to me; all // of us are the same to all // of them; this is all // that matters; all // of us don't matter at all.’
The fear and caution reverberates through these pages, showing ways ‘If immigrants don’t belong in their own neightborhoods, what possibility do we have for national belonging,’ she asks in an excellent video accompanyment for the poem series Blood /Soil. The title draws from a Nazi slogan ‘Blut and Bloden’ used as a rallying cry for eugenicists and nationalists, and, as she points out in the notes, was also chanted by white supremacists in 2017 at a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virigina. The poems are often followed by brief descriptions of violent acts upon South Asians, such as police paralyzing 57 year old Sureshbhai Patel for simply walking through his son’s neighborhood, Sunando Sen being thrown in front of a subway car, or Srinivas Kuchibhotla being shot in a bar in 2017 by a white supremacist who then went to another bar to brag about it. This is a catalog of violent nationalism, and the acknowledgement that much harassment never gets reported.

'When I read the news
of the shooting, these ears rang
the phone-lines of the dead, called
for the knowing trill, the scatter
of sugar, of a spoon circling
a milk tea for one
on the other side
of the world.'

During a lecture I attended virtually, Divya Victor said that ‘grief shifts how we occupy the 1st person singular “I”.’ This shift is omnipresent in these poems, which function as a space to grieve, particularly for those who have had the violence against people who look like them downplayed in the news or simply occurring without much notice. Poet Cathy Park Hong uses the term ‘minor feelings’ in her memoir of the same name to describe the dysphoria of racial feelings questioned or dismissed by the white majority and this term perfectly desribes much of what Victor examines in this book. There is the denial of space to grieve given to those who need it, or the Othering that occurs in regular social situations. In Lawn (Temperate) the poet examines how her own name is made into a joke by those who struggle to pronounce it, neighbors having a laugh at refusing to wrap their tongues around a foreign sounding name. Everywhere in this collection are the minor feelings and aggressions that make one feel not welcomed, Othered, and under threat of violence. One of the most powerful segments in the book spends pages listing the sounds heard in a courtroom as Alka Sinha, wife of the murdered scientist Divyendu Sinha, gives her testimony. We hear every sound, except her voice. An apt examination of the silencing and erasures that occur in the US.

Divya Victor addresses a multitude of big themes here, another being a deep look at colonialism and racism and the ways it flattens identity with any South Asian being considered all the same. She also addresses the way internalized racism can be harmful as well, asking ‘who taught you, brothers, / to want whiteness for your kin? / Who taught you, brothers, to hate the dark flesh / that you’re in?’ This book will hopefully make any reader look inward and make more room for others and to build towards better cultural empathy. ‘Every person that we misrecognize and see as a stranger is actually someone’s loved one…I hope this book will show people that,’ she says in an incredible introduction video for the book (highly recommend watching, it’s brief and powerful).

In closing, Curb is simply outstanding. There is a kinship here to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, and though Divya Victor is an original voice of her own, both these books do well to make space for conversations of racism and the threats of violence upon the body. Curb is a powerful work on loss and identity, and one you should certainly read.

5/5

'I make the marks. These are fleshy
anniversaries of days on which I have not died; days on which
I have agreed to be similar to someone; days on which I have
yanked a flag planted in the earth & buried it; days I have
consented to be kith for someone else; days on which I, for a
brief, resplendent, filthy moment, remember who I am...'

[Jay Shelat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Curb is the best poetry collection I have read in the last 10 years.

[October Hill Magazine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review by Julianna Björkstén, Assistant Poetry Editor and Book Reviewer October Hill Magazine

Divya Victor’s latest collection, Curb, documents the day-to-day trauma—the consequence of colonialism, systemic racism, and hate crimes—experienced by South Asian immigrants and Americans with crackling, poetic precision. In its transcription of both commonplace microaggressions and domestic joys, Victor’s collection illuminates the lived realities of belonging and unbelonging as an immigrant in America. Curb bears witness to the unacknowledged, invisible, and ever-present racism in urban and suburban America and commemorates South Asians killed by white supremacist violence, often, as the title suggests, on their own doorsteps.

A celebrated and masterful poet, Victor flexes her aesthetic range throughout the collection. Made up of 14 sections (including the “Notes & Objects Cited” at the back), each section boasts its own unique logic; voice, form, and tone cannot be pinned down. Curb exhibits a kind of intertextual documentary poetics, quoting court testimonies, referencing historical documents, and providing blocky journalistic descriptions of hate crimes. Some poems, particularly in the “More Curbs” section, seem to stutter on the page; the repetition of their broken, isolated words constitute disjointed flashes of violence—decipherable only due to the explanatory paragraphs that follow.

Many of the poems, particularly the ones told in first person, detail the linguistic lineage of displacement and the omnipresent lexicon of prejudice in the lives of South Asian migrants. This language appears in the collection through the distant, numb jargon of government forms—visas, FAFSAs, petitions, passport photos, birth/death certificates—which are always in the margins of immigrant life. Victor interweaves this harsh, impersonal jargon with the intimate, evocative language of the family and the domestic, thereby demonstrating the gross disconnect between lived diasporic experience and the way South Asian bodies are handled by imperialist institutions. In her poems, Victor counters the patronizing voice of empire and institution (“ma’am can you name two national holidays?”) with the devoted language of family and belonging (“...ma was a bowl made for two, brimming / beyond any border”)...[read the rest of the review in October Hill Magazine's Spring 2021 Issue]

[Jasveen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lyrically, I really enjoyed this book. Victor has such a strong sense of sonic appeal and the use of location, primary documents, and sound made for a really visceral reading experience. I feel as though some of the "flattening" the book was trying to work against was actually done by the book. It was never mentioned that Balbir Singh Sodhi was a Sikh. In my opinion, that is a key element when discussing how south asian identities are merged in the U.S. I don't necessarily think that this is a fault of the book but rather the fact that there is so much nuance to this topic it's difficult to get it all in one volume of poetry.. Another sign that more needs to be written!

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

If my memory is ashen, it is because
I have refused to Google harm.
Give me the names of the people
who have kissed her chin.
Let me write them letters
to say what this poem can’t.

Stop bath & rinse,
then hang up this feeling
by its arms.

(from "Gulf")

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

"the percussive hinder, the fescues
of coriander, thunder
haitch, haitch, haitch
turns the lathe with each exhale"

—Locution / Location

[Marlena Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this is the first book of poetry I’ve ever finished.

“Frequency” and the following ten “Segment” poems were probably my favorite. Hearing her read from the book was beautiful.

[Adrian Corrales · Rating 5 out of 5]

Went to a reading she did yesterday, her petition series really really struck me. Her sharp language really comes together for me in her petition series. “Im writing a petition for my mother’s brown eyes” made me swell into tears. Just rlly powerful stuff

[gyanve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Accomplished exactly what it was meant to

[Aarti · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s strange being Indian-American. We make <1% the US population, but my life experience is so heavily Indian it’s hard to believe we barely make a dent. How can something so essential to me be so invisible to others?⁣
⁣
“𝘏𝘦𝘳 𝘯𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦. 𝘐𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘸𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳, 𝘢 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘣𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴, 𝘢𝘯 𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘢𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘢 𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘰𝘯. 𝘐𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘥 & 𝘣𝘰𝘺 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨.”⁣
⁣
Several coworkers consistently mispronounce my name, even after they hear it pronounced correctly by others. I sometimes wonder if they just hear it differently and are oblivious, but mostly I assume they don’t care enough to adjust, that I am the one who should adjust my expectations.
⁣
“𝘞𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦, 𝘪𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘢𝘴 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘦, 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘢 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘴𝘬𝘪𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵; 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘸𝘩𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘫𝘢𝘴𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘣𝘶𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘧𝘭𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘪𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘺𝘢𝘳𝘥…”⁣
⁣
This poetry collection is very moving. I do not read a lot of poetry, and some of it went over my head, but what resonated with me really resonated. It is about white supremacy targeted at South Asians since 9/11, either because of who we are or because people mistake us for what we’re not. It’s about making what is often rendered invisible, visible.⁣
⁣
Victor intersperses her poems with spare descriptions of unprovoked violence against South Asians. It reminds me of the looks we exchange, the texts we send, the breaths we exhale, whenever a mass shooting happens and we worry that it was a brown person who did it, and we brace for people to assume that if it was a brown person, it was a terrorist attack. It makes me think of friends who have been told to “go back to India and take the delta variant with you,” a weirdly specific and well-informed place from which to dive into blanket racism.⁣
⁣
Excellent collection.

[My Tam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yowza. Cutting, guttural, toothsome. I am not the same. A searing unflinching chronicle of the racism and violence toward our South Asian neighbors after 9/11. A beautiful render of philosophy, culture, urbanism, placemaking as manifestation of violence, and literary thought. Aaand a Run The Jewels reference. What more can you ask for in a poetry book? Look forward to many more from this author.

[Susanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes you just have to read some poetry and this was a great collection. I will be honest that some of the entries I was not able to follow, maybe a printed copy would have been better. The stories of violence against immigrants just broke my heart. The design of the book is also poignant with GPS coordinates of where these violent acts have taken place. Eye opening.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Just really beautifully done. From the formatting to the stories woven in with poetry, I basically loved everything about this book. Really hard hitting, pulls no punches.

[Samantha M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important (for the Indian community in America, and those who want to understand more), moving, and thought-provoking.

[Quoth the Robyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I am asking / for a body thrown so far / it meets itself / in the mouth."

I do not think that anyone could argue against the importance of Curb by Divya Victor. Curb details the horrific, deadly, metamorphic experience of being Indian in America and the continued punishment of becoming American. Not only does this book act as documentation of this journey, but it simultaneously is a lament of Indian people who lost their lives to hate crimes pre and post 9/11. This book knows its purpose and does not stray. Victor demands remembrance for her own personal experience within the United States and those who she will not forget.

I come away from this collection deeply moved and thinking about my relationship to distance, both physical and metaphorical. Physical distance between people and spiritual distance from those who are gone through violent means and not. The title of this collection sums up its heart. Curb—the space just outside of home, outside of reach, and yet close enough to be seen from a window, close enough to call out to someone from inside, close enough to be remembered.

"What is the force that can lift a child / into the air and throw her across the world?"

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate the book's ambition and scope, as it takes on bias against South Asian people. In particular, where the reader is forced to confront the violent assault on random people on the street. Many poems juxtapose an imagistic poem evoking the event with a short prose explanation of the actual event. It feels, in fact, like this constitutes the primary ethos of the book. It's a kind of reportage poetics, reporting on an event in the form of a poem.

Personally, though, I find the poems elaborating on a poetic term established by other poems in the book to be far more compelling. The "Milestones: A Theory of Marking/ Of Being Marked" or the series of "Sequence" poems feel so much more invested in what it means to use poems as way to express the event. Like a poem isn't just about making an event known. It is a whole other kind of logic. It is moments like this that I find myself most immersed in the rhetoric Victor employs.

[Elias Mendel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title is the only thing this has in common with Larry David

We've been making room for bones on the streets...

Really interesting reading this in our precent moment in the States, a time or freedom being curtailed and state violence, as it gives some perspective taking you to the time of fear and racism felt by the south Asian community after 9 11. Really nuanced look and not uncritical look at that experience.

We sit letting history catch up wow

Feels strange describing such a violent book as beautiful but also is incredible beautiful and written so poetically.

I haven't really read many book poems that narratively work but also is a collection of poems and it's really effective. I really enjoyed the structure of many of the people's the varying methods and techniques for structuring the page and the rhythm of the words and lines.

Has inspired me to write more poetry again.

[Matt Maielli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting work. The double (triple?) entendre of the title works to devastating effect. I wondered early on how appropriate it is to use the very public and infamous post-9/11 murders of South Asians as a delivery structure for poetry; however, I then realized that I likely wouldn’t have learned about many of these cases without this book. Plenty of well-done tricks in here, especially the application for US citizenship papers as vehicle for poetry. Also does things that I didn’t know you could do in a poetry book, like marking pages with coordinates that correspond to the real events that inspired her words, or the extensive “sources” section for each poem.

[stuti phalahari · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was heart wrenching 😹 it’s a miracle I survived this read..really great depiction of a post 911 state for brown families especially those trying to immigrate

Victor evoked such a sense of community and togetherness from this book. So much of my own immigration experience screamed at me through these pages and the idea of language, migration - don’t have enough words to praise this poetry collection, it’s probably the best one I’ve ever read.

I would recommend to anyone who appreciates masterful poetry and prose - poetry that transcends time and race and identity, it just simply is phenomenal

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is one of the most transformative poetry texts I have ever read. like there's good poetry books, and then there's books that fundamentally change the way in which I think about writing- and this book is one of them. I gotta admit, I wasn't immediately hooked by the style of the writing in the beginning...and then WOAH. the style of the poetry absolutely captured me, and I keep thinking about this book even after I finished. the writing is gorgeous, heartbreaking, and brutally cutting the whole book through. read this, read this, READ THIS!!!

[Ryleigh Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book perhaps made of “garlanded efforts” as Divya explained the writing process at a workshop I attended with her. There is so much to appreciate and admire about this book, and much of it is impossible to understand without reading it. The story behind how this book came to be is also fascinating; at first an artist’s book (which can be found online)!!

[Mya Matteo]

not my type of poetry for the most part. I'm just too boring lol, experimental stuff is hard for me to feel connected to.

[haley ⊹ · Rating 4 out of 5]

brilliant work. there were a few poems I couldn't quite grasp but that's on me 😭

[Sean S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vivid imagery, tragic subject. Among the more creative uses of the written word I have seen in recent history.

[Paul Cannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely confronting, this is not for the faint hearted.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wishing I could have seen the original book. Not my favorite Victor book, but a solid project dealing with post-911 racism and hate crimes.

[Nicole Wang · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly important book of poetry. Message is loud, clear, and strong, but the poems remain artful and beautifully written. It had my heart sinking. I could not run away from the bloody battle encapsulated in these poems. Victor makes beautiful art out of the mess we live in. I had the great pleasure of talking to her in person. She embraces the joy and hardships of being an immigrant in American with song and grace. Love it!