Illiterate Heart and Raw Silk

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“Raw Silk,” is a deeply moving collection from a poet who crosses borders New York City poet Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad , India and divided her childhood between India and the Sudan . From her cross-cultural perspective Alexander writes with moving intensity of post-September 11 events as she evokes violence and civil strife, love, despair, and a hard-won hope. This autobiographical cycle of poems reflects the surrealism of such a life, and is shot through with the frissons of pleasure and pain, of beauty and tension, that mark a truly global identity.

Praise for Alexander’s Illiterate Heart: “With her bold syntax and polycultural texts, Alexander reckons with the past through language and lyric, pushing the poem down the river to its abiding source “where syntax smolders.” — Women’s Review of Books

Author Bio

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John Yau is the author of more than two dozen books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. His most recent books of poetry include Borrowed Love Poems (Penguin) and My Heart is That Eternal Rose Tattoo (Black Sparrow Press). The Passionate Spectator, a book of essays on poetry and art, will be published by the University of Michigan Press. His next book of poems--which is not yet titled--will be published by Penguin in 2006. He was recently appointed Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University).


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Meena Alexander is an award winning author and scholar. Her new book of poetry Birthplace with Buried Stones (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press) is forthcoming in Fall 2013. Her volumes of poetry include Illiterate Heart (winner of the PEN Open Book Award), Raw Silk and Quickly Changing River. Her poetry has been translated into several languages and set to music. She has written the acclaimed autobiography, Fault Lines as well as two novels. She is author of the academic study Women in Romanticism and the book of essays Poetics of Dislocation. She is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York and teaches at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.