Quickly Changing River
(Poetry)
"Quickly Changing River is an alluvial force of surprises reaching near and far, always beckoning us closer and closer to its urgent and magical source. From the collection’s first poem to its last, 'Cosmopolitan' to 'August 14, 2004,' there's a movement here that challenges and enchants. Meena Alexander is a truth-teller who knows how to make language do anything and everything she desires." -- Yusef Komunyakaa
"These are poems of rich and satisfying detail -- gingko trees and water taxis, the pearly feathers of pigeons. But the real strength of this book goes far beyond detail. however lyrically rendered. These poems are a sustained elegy for homelessness, for the displacement at the heart of human life. Meena Alexander is an eloquent and ambitious poet." -- Eavan Boland
January 2008
Aletheia ( Girl in River Water)
First I saw your face,
Then your whole body lying still
Hands jutting , eyelids shut ,
Twin nostrils flare, sheer
Efflorescence when memory cannot speak –
A horde of body parts glistening.
Your were feet at an angle
Stuck in a tainted stream,
And under your ankles the spectre of a horse,
Its chestnut mane lopped off,
An ordinary creature in a time of war,
Hooves blown, trying to make do.
Raw Silk
(Poetry)
"Meena Alexander sings of countries, foreign and familiar, places where the heart and spirit live, and places for which one needs a passport and visas. Her voice guides us far away and back home. The reader sees her visions and remembers, and is uplifted." -- Maxine Hong Kingston
"Raw Silk demonstrates the rare blend of an acute, utterly contemporary intelligence with a sensuality that is, in itself, a radical way of processing information. In its profound and polyglot sense of world citizenship gained through the indelible experience of exile, Meena Alexander has written what is -- not at all paradoxically -- a book that's quintessentially a New Yorker's. This is a poetry which earns the reader's trust, even, or especially, when the paths it takes in its explorations of the writer's multiple worlds and of the forms poetry can make of them are unexpected."-- Marilyn Hacker
Illiterate Heart
(Poetry)
(Winner of the PEN Open Book Award)
"When I read these poems even silently, I hear them. The language is so clear, the telling so clean, the feeling so deep. This is a big collection, generous and beautiful. A happiness at its darkest to read." -- Grace Paley
"Meena Alexander's lines are like `fire in an old man's sleeve/ coiled rosebuds struck from a branch/ Our earthly world slit open.' These are numinous poems." -- Arthur Sze
River and Bridge
(Poetry)
"Meena Alexander is one of the finest Indian poets writing today" -- Keki Daruwalla
"The next time that someone suggests that poetry cannot honestly deal with the real news of the world, I will raise the name of Meena Alexander and this fine book like a flag -- or a prayer." -- Cornelius Eady
"The river and bridge are ultimately the same. Just as New York City and Delhi merge in the body and imagination of a woman making poetry near the end of an age, Meena Alexander eloquently leads to the conclusion of this fine collection with 'There is no grief like this/ the origin of landscape is mercy.'These poems are the journey we take with her to know this, utterly." -- Joy Harjo
Indian Love Poems
(Edited Anthology)
"This delightful compendium of translations selected and edited by poet Meena Alexander for the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet series is tiny, only 250 pages, but it's an encyclopedia in disguise: nothing's missing. The poems are sometimes passionate, sometimes poignant, sometimes pitiless, often wry, witty or amusing, almost never angry. The lovers are hopeful, fearful, ecstatic, euphoric, fulfilled, reflective, resigned, bemused, sad, calm. Whether the selection was written 2000 years ago in Sanskrit, Prakit or Old Tamil or only yesterday in the languages of modern India (Hindi, Oriya, Urdu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Bengali, Kannada, English), the feelings ring true. And the book's organization couldn't be more perfect. It follows the very trajectory of love: waiting, meeting, parting. Serenity and wisdom come from accepting the inevitability of this trajectory's occurring." -- Patricia Lee Sharpe
Fault Lines: A Memoir
("Best Books of 1993" Publishers Weekly)
"This new edition of Fault Lines shows us a poet intent on seeing herself straight ... the narrative digs deeper into childhood and reexamines adulthood more painfully than its predecessor, but it carries the same magic of language and image." -- Jill Ker Conway
"Meena Alexander will be a part of the history of global culture. She knows how it looks, feels, tastes and sounds; how it creates and splits identity. Ten years ago, she published an extraordinary memoir, Fault Lines. Now with her habitual courage and subtlety and eloquence, she has interlaced the memoir’s words with new experiences, perceptions, pain, and visions. Fault Lines is faultless." --Catherine R. Stimpson
"It is difficult to find words with which to preface Meena Alexander’s personal memories. As brilliantly captured in this new edition of Fault Lines, the memories are their own preface and introduction to a mesmerizing text culled from a life lived in fragments and migrations, a quest for nadu at home and in exile ... Hers is a life where the present and past are simultaneous remembrances of each other. Her here, in India, Sudan, Europe, and the United States, is both everywhere and nowhere, a life of a ceaseless search for answers where the only certainty is the qalam she holds in her hand, with which she stitches together the fragments of her experience to make a healing wholeness. After all, as a writer she asks, what does she have but the raw materials of her own life?" -- Ngugi wa Thiong'o , From the preface to the new edition of Fault Lines
The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience
(Poems and Essays)
"Meena Alexander has written a fierce new complexity into questions of identity, diaspora, tradition, language and community. This is a powerful fusion of poetic vision and critical thinking." -- Adrienne Rich
"In concrete imagery and intellectual passion, Alexander is full of surprises. These are haunting texts of hybrid America." -- Gayatri Spivack
"As the condition of migration and cultural displacement comes to be seen as a metaphor for our times, Meena Alexander's poignant and perceptive book is a welcome addition. Here, the postcolonial condition is addressed in its variety and its particularity: as fiction, criticism, personal reflection. This is a compelling, highly crafted performance." -- Homi Bhabha
Manhattan Music
(Novel)
"At once violent and erotic, and somber, Manhattan Music is infused with the power of myth and poetry and the inner life, the electric intersection of characters who illuminate for the reader both the Old World and the New." -- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
"An insightful look at the multiculti, trendy New York downtown art scene of the troubled '90's" -- Jessica Hagedorn
"Alexander's writing is imbued with a poetic grace shot through with an inner violence ... With her gift of heightened sensibility, she can take a tragic, violent situation and juxtapose it with a description of terrible beauty." -- MS
Nampally Road
(Novel)
(Village Voice Literary Supplement, Editors' Choice)
"Like Meena Alexander's poetry, her first novel is a deeply moving blend of lyric beauty and uncompromising toughness. Nampally Road plunges into the tumult, squalor, and corruption of postcolonial India, yet stands back from it at the same time. Alexander's prose is both passionate and hard, vividly immediate yet always crystal clear... a grim, beautiful book" -- Walter Kendrick
"With its restless crowds, cinemas, shops, temples, mango sellers, cobblers, cafes, and bars, Nampally Road becomes a metaphor for contemporary India. Alexander has given us an unsentimental, multifaceted portrait, thankfully remote from that of the British Raj. Her lyrical narrative has the eloquent economy that marks her best poetry ... Alexander treads the waters of fiction lightly and gracefully" -- Village Voice.