On September 15, four days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Frank Roque told a waiter at Applebee’s: “I’m going to go out & shoot some towelheads.” He added:

“We should kill their children, too, because they’ll grow up to be like their parents.”

Roque murdered Balbir Singh Sodhi as he was planting flowers outside his own gas station.

Divya Victor is the author of Curb (2021), winner of the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is also the author of Kith (2017), Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (trans. Lena Schmidt, 2020), Natural Subjects (2014), Unsub (2014), and Things To Do With Your Mouth (2014). Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, The Best American Experimental Writing, Poetry magazine, and more. A 2023 PEN Affiliated Fellow at Civitella Ranieri and collaborator on an Andrew Mellon Just Futures grant, as well as recipient of other awards, her work has been performed or installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and other places. She teaches at Michigan State University, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program.

Curb(ed) is also a multimedia and collaborative website, featuring visual art, sound poetry, and multimedia that expands the landscapes of the poems.

Artist Reflection

Curb began at the interstice of two disciplines—book arts and poetry—and intervenes into conversations about composition, authorship, and solidarity enacted across identity lines. Its very first iteration in the world (2019) was a collaboration between me and Aaron Cohick. In Aaron’s words, it is a “fine press/artists’ book” created  “from the convergence between documentary poetics and the possibilities of structure and legibility in the handmade book.” The formal concerns about structure and legibility enact descriptions and activate questions for me:

How does it feel to walk your own neighborhood as a perpetual stranger?

How does it feel to be disoriented in your own home?

Why are our ways of knowing tethered to (keeping/losing) our bearings?

What are the paths we take to return our bodies to ourselves?

Who are we when we are (at) home?

My early work with Aaron set the stage for enacting further collaborations that would be hosted in an expansive and intentionally designed webspace called Curb(ed): divyavictorcurb.org. It includes an experimental, minimalist documentary using Google satellite imaging, created by Los Angeles-based artist and writer Amarnath Ravva.

Amarnath Ravva’s American Canyon introduced me to fine new textures of text-image relationships in representations of South Asian diasporic life, particularly in the contexts of mourning and grief. His book informed how I thought about the role of photographs, images, archival facsimile, and poetry in my previous book, Kith (2017). I wanted his sensitive dedication to the tether between the environmental and the sentimental to be registered in Curb’s life as well, because I found his questions about ritual, sensation, attention, and memory to be important and eternal. His video quilts, occasioned by Curb(ed), suggest, for me, the co-existence of macro and micro attentions within the phenomenological experience of natural and built spaces, which resists the abstractions of digital satellite imaging technologies that shape diasporic communication and movement. His works here are the tender and attentive responses to the question “What are the paths we take to return our bodies to ourselves?”