SUTURES

by Divya Victor

In writing that excites its forms with cultural complexity, Divya Victor challenges what otherwise goes unremarked in the regenerate exceptionalism of US American poetics. In work that pulses with playfulness and sober restraint, the hard facts of immigration and the skills required for global citizenship are ensnared in a global economy of production and consumption in whose underworld the sound of music engenders latent fantasies and fear.
—Roberto Tejada, author of Exposition Park and Mirrors for Gold


The song says and thus this solves the problem identified in the figure below yet then thrusts a whitened rest at threes and sixes. No octave either; this lyric bites its likely chimes. Sung from doe to tea, what song—what la?—is blank like me? Against a cloying nursery-national interpolation and a likewise saccharine belief not so much that the other driver will stop (good Christ, is that irrational!), but rather that someone planned all this for us and, heaven help him, is perhaps still up there in control, these two movements ask and answer. If Sutures at the Picnic gives a set of chords, Brace Position sings them twain, its subjects (natural or other) fractured and refracted to lethal edge. Thus, the lyre’s slice: just after the edge drawn across one’s skin, just before the blood welling into a future stitch. In all, throated as it is from glass and honey, Victor’s Sutures weaves a sharpened silicate resolve.
—Andrew Rippeon

Genres: Poetry

48 pages, ebook/ paperback

First published January 1, 2009

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.