The first anthology of its kind, Indivisible brings together forty-nine American poets who trace their roots to Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Featuring award-winning poets including Meena Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Vijay Seshadri, here are poets who share a long history of grappling with a multiplicity of languages, cultures, and faiths. The poems gathered here take us from basketball courts to Bollywood, from the Grand Canyon to sugar plantations, and from Hindu-Muslim riots in India to anti-immigrant attacks on the streets of post–9/11 America.
Showcasing a diversity of forms, from traditional ghazals and sestinas to free verse, experimental writing, and slam poetry, Indivisible presents 141 poems by authors who are rewriting the cultural and literary landscape of their time and their place. Includes biographies of each poet.
Neelanjana Banerjee is a teaching artist at the San Francisco Writers Corps and a past editor-in-chief of Asian Week.
Summi Kaipa is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, author of three chapbooks and a play, and past editor of Interlope magazine. She is currently completing her residency in neuropsychology. Kaipa lives in Berkeley, California.
Pireeni Sundaralingam is an award-winning poet, playwright, and cognitive scientist. A former PEN USA fellow, her work has been published in England, Ireland, Sweden, and the USA. She is currently working on her first collection of poetry.
“Rarely does one have the pleasure of seeing so many poets violate the truth that no one can be in two places at once. Indivisible provides hundreds of local poetic delights and deserves a place among the best anthologies of poetry.”
—Billy Collins
“Indivisible is seamless passion, held together by the will to cross borders and embrace that which is sacred in the individual. This collection of poems underscores a voyage through physical and psychological time and space, but it also clearly undermines any notion of a diaspora of the soul and spirit. Moments of graceful resiliency are captured again and again, and Indivisible becomes an unbroken map of lyrical recollection. There are lived lives behind these marvelous poems.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa, Distinguished Senior Poet at NYU
“Like seedlings breaking through concrete cracks, the poems collected in Indivisible widen the literary landscape and expose the reader to fresh terrain. Gathering together for the first time of an expansive and varied set of voices representing the breadth of South Asian American poetry, reading Indivisible is like witnessing the wings of a newly discovered bird, outstretched, reaching for an untouched horizon.
—Matthew Shenoda, author of Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone
“No-one can speak for ‘America’ or ‘Humanity,’ but these poems give us a glimpse of both. Scattered among them are treasures and heartbreaks, mercurial descriptions of life and languid backward glances at what is left behind, what cannot be recovered. This is a language map of South Asian America. Come. Come for a ride.”
—Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Karma of Brown Folk
“Indivisible features a lively, accomplished array of poems, truly transnational but also quintessentially American, exemplifying contemporary cultural pluralism. This anthology is well worth your undivided attention.”
—North American Review, Spring 2011
“[A] remarkable collection.”
—Bookdragon
