CURB | AN ARTIST’S BOOK

CURB is an artist’s book written by Divya Victor. It is designed and printed by Aaron Cohick, and published by The Press at Colorado College.

The work focuses on historical scenes that have set the stage for critical and communal discourse on hate crimes committed against South Asian migrants within a larger context of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, which have seen a documented rise since the attacks on the World Trade Center, spiking after the 2016 Presidential elections.

The book centers on three historical scenes that represent nationally significant hate-crimes: the assault on and death of Navroze Mody, after leaving a café (New Jersey, 1987); the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi (Arizona, 2001), while planting flowers outside his own gas station; the murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, while he was having an after-work drink at a bar (Kansas, 2017).

The poems pursue documentary traditions, favoring an expansive approach to intertextuality, source-to-page relationships, the range of roles available for the voice, and intermedial contact (between text and image).