Curb

Winner of the 2022 PEN Open Book Award

Winner of the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Awards in Poetry

Curb maps our post-9/11 political landscape by locating the wounds of domestic terrorism at unacknowledged sites of racial and religious conflict across cities and suburbs of the United States. 

Divya Victor documents how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living: lawns, curbs, and sidewalks, undergirded by violence but also constantly repaved with new possibilities of belonging. Curb witnesses immigrant survival, familial bonds, and interracial parenting in the context of nationalist and white-supremacist violence against South Asians. The book refutes the binary of the model minority and the monstrous, dark “other” by reclaiming the throbbing, many-tongued, vermillion heart of kith.

Divya Victor is the author of Kith, Natural Subjects (Winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), Unsub, and Things To Do With Your Mouth. Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including, more recently, BOMB, the New Museum's The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, and boundary2. Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech. She teaches at Michigan State University.