Kith

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. In KITH, award-winning writer Divya Victor engages Indian-American diasporic culture in the twentieth century, via an autobiographical account that explores what 'KITH' might mean outside of the national boundaries of those people belonging to the Indian and Southeast Asian diasporas. Through an engagement with the effects of globalization on identity formation, cultural and linguistic exchange, and demographic difference, Kith explores questions about race and ethnic difference: How do 'brownness' and 'blackness' emerge as traded commodities in the transactions of globalization? What are the symptoms of belonging? How and why does 'kith' diverge from 'kin,' and what are the affects and politics of this divergence? Historically-placed and well-researched, KITH is an unflinching and simultaneous account of both systemic and interpersonal forms of violence and wounding in the world today.

"For Divya Victor, history is a wound. And the poet's language is bright like the white bandage on which blood shows more clearly. What we have on display in this book is an imagination that is as wide as the world. Part-anthem, part-instruction manual, part-memoir, part-dictionary, this text offers testimony to other ways of being and remembering, a reflection on forgotten lives. I read most of KITH in airplanes and airports, and found myself paying greater attention to everyone around me. I was grateful for Victor's long sentences that spilled into seemingly every corner of our contemporary reality—these sentences that describe so well our locked destinies and, at the same time, perhaps because of their wit, or vitality, or compassion, deliver us into liberated zones of heightened consciousness."—Amitava Kumar

"KITH is a luminous work of 'Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering,' as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha might say, the dead flittering out of her thrifted coats with kith in their mouths. Kith, like neighbor, friend, enemy, or community, is a kind of conceptual limit, 'not of blood and yet belonging'; not kin, which it is often confused with, but kindred, kinship, and also knowledge. Yet in KITH, it turns out that kith is also kin and kin is also kith and the neighbor is also friend, enemy, and the other neighbor's neighbor, and 'we' are all stuck here at the limits of language grasping for new forms of community and belonging when those words suck too yet refuse to burn. Lodged within this 'atlas of mangle' known as now-time is something at the helm of being named— KITH's offering, KITH's knowledge, KITH's open boat, KITH's astounding 'shriek frightful.' Where were you when it will happen?"—Rachel Zolf

"A keen shriek for stricken kin, Kith pierced me. Divya Victor's concentrated anger and t(h)rilling intelligence reverberate through these poems, essays, pronunciation exercises, and grim primers. This monumental work shifts shapes, not for virtuosity's sake—though virtuosic it is—but as one takes up an array of instruments for an intricate undertaking. Quandary: How not to 'become a jingle of anklets' the colonizer desires? Perhaps by being a jangle of them. Kith is that dissonance composed; it sounds bitter, tender, and utterly necessary."—Douglas Kearney

Divya Victor is the author of KITH (Fence Books / BookThug, 2017), UNSUB (Insert Blanc, 2015), NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow, 2014, winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues, 2014), Swift Taxidermies 1919-1922 (GaussPDF, 2014), Goodbye John! On John Baldessari (GaussPDF, 2012), PUNCH (GaussPDF, 2011), and the Partial trilogy (Troll Thread, 2011-2012). Her chapbooks include Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place (2011) and SUTURES (2009). Her criticism and commentary have appeared in Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Jacket2, and the Poetry Foundation's Harriet. Her work has been collected in the New Museum's The Animated Reader, the reedition of bpNichol's Translating Translating Apollinaire, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, Hobo, VLAK, The Best American Experimental Writing, and boundary2, among other venues. Her poetry has been translated into French and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Mandeville Poetry Collections at University of California San Diego, and a writer in residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (LACE). She lives in the United States and Singapore, where she is assistant professor of poetry and writing at Nanyang Technological University.