Divya Victor

Praise for Curb

Divya Victor’s vigorously researched hybrid work expertly shows how the discrimination embedded in American social practices acts against the South Asian community to devastating effect. …Lyric poems blend with journalistic narrative to transform documentation into artful revelation.

Jaquira Díaz, Rigoberto González, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Khadijah Queen
Judges Citation, PEN America Open Book Award

Layered, rich, and epic, Curb is an incredible collection that must be read and re-read.

Cathy Park Hong

Always at the edge of war and friendship, Curb reminds us that in brutality we still manage to lift, salvage, hold the beautiful things, not least of which each other.

Julietta Singh, for The Millions

Curb… is a profound act of poetic debridement for the South Asian American diaspora, and an insistent plea to resist erasure by first acknowledging, absorbing, processing, and remembering our own communal histories.

Jenny Bhat, for NPR

In poems of brilliant aesthetic diversity and haunting imagery, Curb illuminates and challenges the boundaries that divide and discipline us.

Evie Shockley, for NPR

This is an incredibly well-crafted collection by a globally minded, locally rooted, exceedingly brilliant poet.

Booklist, starred review

Praise for Kith

A keen shriek for stricken kin, Kith pierced me. Divya Victor's concentrated anger and t(h)rilling intelligence reverberate through these poems, essays, pronunciation exercises, and grim primers.

Douglas Kearney

[In] Kith, it turns out that kith is also kin and kin is also kith and the neighbor is also friend, enemy, and the other neighbor's neighbor, and ‘we’ are all stuck here at the limits of language grasping for new forms of community and belonging when those words suck too yet refuse to burn.

Syd (Rachel) Zolf

What we have on display in this book is an imagination that is as wide as the world. Part-anthem, part-instruction manual, part-memoir, part-dictionary, this text offers testimony to other ways of being and remembering, a reflection on forgotten lives.

Amitava Kumar

[Kith’s] formal juxtaposition highlights Victor’s penchant for genre-bending experimentalism as well as her linguistic and cerebral dexterity.

Eric Schmaltz, for The Puritan

Portrait photograph by Marco Giugliarelli
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