Quickly Changing River: Poems

by Meena Alexander

Recipient, 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship

With her strong voice and precise language, Meena Alexander has crafted this visceral, worldly collection of poems. The experience she brings to the reader is sensual in many senses of the word, as she invokes bright colors, sounds, smells, and feelings. Her use of vivid imagery from the natural world—birds, lilies, horses—up against that from the world of humans—oppression, slavery, and violence—ties her work to the earth even as she works a few mystical poetic transformations. In Alexander’s world, the songs of a bird can become the voice of a girl in a café and the red juice of mulberries can be as shocking as blood. When she focuses her attention on the cloth of a girl’s sari, the material of a woman’s life, or the blood in her veins, she speaks to the particular experience of women in the world. The women are vividly present—sometimes they are hidden or veiled, juxtaposed with open gardens in full bloom. It is difficult not to come away from Quickly Changing River without a new sense of the power and frailty of being alive.  

Aletheia (Girl in River Water)

 

First I saw your face,

The your whole body lying still

Hands jutting, eyelids shut

 

Twin nostrils flare, sheer

Efflorescebce when memory cannot speak-

a horde of body parts glistening.

Genres: Poetry

136 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Meena Alexander was an internationally acclaimed poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander lived and worked in New York City, where she was Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and at the CUNY Graduate Center in the PhD program in English. She was the author of numerous collections of poetry, literary memoirs, essays, and works of fiction and literary criticism.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[DilanAc · Rating 3 out of 5]

While neither the syntax nor the vocabulary is complicated, the images are obscure and difficult to interpret although hauntingly beautiful. She is a master of the short line.