Natural Subjects - Softcover

Victor, Divya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0988725770 ISBN 13: 9780988725775

Publisher: Trembling Pillow Press, 2014

Synopsis

Winner of the 2014 Bob Kaufman Book Prize selected by Anselm Berrigan. "May I see your passport, please?" What are you a citizen of? What subject to? Are you natural or naturalized? What have you sworn to and will you tell true? Divya Victor, true to form in wit and poetic acuteness, has made a book about nations, nationality, and their notions by showing documents, facts, fictional and real heroines, instructions for assembly, and lyric lists that makes readers acknowledge their own disassembly, distribution, and/ or dispersal in an on-going diaspora. This acute work by Victor teases civic ideologies in all their motley, pervasive constructions by writing from multiple subjectivities and engineering defiance, struggles with agency, language play, appropriated commentaries, and revelations of loss. A multi-faceted book of high interest. Rachel Blau DuPlessis A mandala of homeland motifs and constellations that are numbered but not named bursts, at the start of Divya Victor’s strangely painful and real new book, to reveal: talons, attempts, a “pose.” These initiating frames take us through a naturalization process – from the gathering of biometric data to the duplex-pomegranate-linoleum reverie of the pledge ceremony itself. Questions of “exit” and “enunciation” accrue a “blunt hum” as the book progresses. Lit from within by an “opal glass shade” or the “violent and excited” intake. Yet never clarified. Here, for example, is Dimple Kapadia, taking the stage like late onset “logopoeia.” Are you a “great scholar”? Are you a “lover”? Did you make your home in the trampled lot behind the Edison IKEA? Did you “maybe write things”? Victor has written a book that is both heart-breaking and a brilliant, effervescent and dark joke. Bhanu Kapil, author of Schizophrene

About this title

About the Author

Divya Victor is the author of THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues, 2014), NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow, 2014), and Unsub (Insert/Blanc, 2015). She is also author of the Partial series (Troll Thread), Punch (2011), Goodbye John! On John Baldessari (2012), and Swift Taxidermies (2014), all from Gauss PDF; and the chapbook Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place (2011). She divides her time between the United States and Singapore, where she is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Nanyang Technological University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Trembling Pillow Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0988725770
• ISBN 13: 9780988725775
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 140