A Nostalgist S Map Of America

A collection of poems dealing with the themes of journey, exile, myth, politics, history, and loss

Mapping America as he travels westward, the Nostalgist is an exile from his native Kashmir, and even from his first American home; his is the unique perspective of the outsider. These jeweled, intricate poems, like the multilayered "In Search of Evanescence," locate and reflect the America that must be "unseen to be believed." Somewhere between cartographer and stargazer, the Nostalgist links images of water, desert, and myth, returning to Tucson in the monsoons, or seeing Chile in his rearview mirror, all the while creating an intense and vital vision.

There is no poetry without memory. Recovery and Transgression: Memory in American Poetry is devoted to the ways in which poetic texts shape, and are shaped by, personal, collective, and cultural memory. It looks at the manifold and often transgressive techniques through which the past is recovered and repurposed in poetry. T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Susan Howe’s THIS THAT, Lyn Hejinian’s Writing Is an Aid to Memory, John Tranter’s “The Anaglyph,” Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America,” and Amy Clampitt’s “Nothing Stays Put” are only some of the texts discussed in this volume by a group of international poetry experts. They specifically focus on the effects of the cultural interaction, mixture, translation, and hybridization of memory of, in, and mediated by poetry. Poetic memory, as becomes strikingly clear, may be founded on the past, but has everything to do with the cultural present of poets and readers, and with their hopes and fears for the future.

Featuring essays by American, Indian, and British scholars, this collection offers critical appraisals and personal reflections on the life and work of the transnational poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001). Though sometimes identified as an "Indian writer in English," Shahid came to designate himself as a Kashmiri-American writer in exile in the United States, where he lived for the latter half of his life, publishing seven volumes of poetry and teaching at colleges and universities across the country. Locating Shahid in a diasporic space of exile, the volume traces the poet's transnationalist attempts to bridge East and West and his movement toward a true internationalism. In addition to offering close formal analyses of most of Shahid's poems and poetry collections, the contributors also situate him in relation to both Western and subcontinental poetic forms, particularly the ghazal. Many also offer personal anecdotes that convey the milieu in which the poet lived and wrote, as well as his personal preoccupations. The book concludes with the poet's 1997 interview with Suvir Kaul, which appears in print here for the first time.

Although treated as two distinct schools of thought, ecocriticism and geocriticism have both placed emphasis on the lived environment, whether through social or natural spaces. For the first time, this interdisciplinary collection of essays addresses the complementary and contested aspects of these approaches to literature, culture, and society.

This anthology shows the influences of Western literature and the Western literary traditions, especially as they exist in world literature written in English. It contains stories and poems dealing with South Asian American experiences and presents the evocative themes of love, loss, and exile.