This poem is a response to India's Nuremberg-style Citizen (Amendment) Act, which facilitates citizenship for undocumented migrants from neighboring countries except Muslims; the revoking of Jammu & Kashmir's constitutional autonomy (India’s only Muslim-majority state), and the subsequent internet shutdown there (the longest imposed in a democracy); the communal violence between Hindus and Muslims in Delhi, February 2020, where the police actively abetted in violence against Muslims in what can only be called a pogrom; the continued state-sanctioned discrimination against Muslims in the form of cow-vigilantism, boycotting of Muslim businesses, evictions and hate-speech. Tishani Doshi on "The Stormtroopers of My Country" |
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"This Book of Poetry Says, 'I Have Fists.'""Fists curling and uncurling. People who don't look each other in the eye. Food, and everyone coming together around it. These are the images at the core of Jane Wong's second collection of poems, How To Not Be Afraid Of Everything."via NPR |
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| "It's not misdirection for art's sake; it's misdirection as mimesis, the mind's if not the external world's, the shared world's. Or maybe it is, as Kelly would perhaps have insisted, the shared world's way, after all. That, and the poem's music, which is the world's music, that goes on and on, and in which we are invited—really, commanded—to participate, for a little while." |
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