Sumita Chakraborty
“It inspires and excites me to think of how there will always be more to know and more to do than I will ever have known or ever have done. It motivates me to try new things–to always be starting out on something.”
“This powerful and endlessly mysterious collection of poems is a book of fables, of spells, of revised narratives, and of realigned songs, brightly lifted above our bodies by music that is as unpredictable as it is marvelous. The lyricism is everywhere apparent as Sumita Chakraborty addresses us, our bodies and their stories, our planet, and our sense of time itself. How does she do it? Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry, W. H. Auden wrote about Yeats, and as the hurt enters Chakraborty’s language, we see that in speech violated, sounds and meanings—and even the oldest of human mysteries, like ‘the etymology of love’—are redefined. All one can do is repeat: this is an endlessly compelling book. Bravo.””
“About a quarter of the way through Sumita Chakraborty’s Arrow, the reader encounters an impossible poem called ‘Dear, beloved.’ It’s impossible because who could write it? It’s as large, in its way, as any epic, but as compressed as any lyric, and as beautiful as any lyric, but as foundational as any epic, but it seems to come after all things, though it seems, also, diurnal. And it’s impossible also because it’s a highlight, not the highlight, of Arrow, a debut as assured as any first or last book, as compelling as any, as well-made.”
“Chakraborty writes poems that are full of life and joy even when she is thinking through violence and grief, but in their sweep they defy easy notions of aboutness.”
“[Arrow] is a book to hold close, an amulet that transmutes the intensities of grief into something uplifting, the attempt to keep hold of wonder.”
Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar. Her acclaimed debut collection of poetry, Arrow (Alice James Books, 2020) was praised in the New York Times as an “allusive and witty debut.” She is currently working on her first scholarly book, titled Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, which is under an advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press, and a second collection of poems, titled The B-Sides of the Golden Record. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Offing, Massachusetts Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She has published public-facing criticism in Rain Taxi and The Los Angeles Review of Books, and her articles have appeared in Cultural Critique, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE), Modernism/modernity, College Literature, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships, honors, and awards from the Poetry Foundation, the Forward Arts Foundation, Kundiman, the National Humanities Center, the Seamus Heaney Centre, and more.
In 2017, she received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation; in 2018, her poem “And death demands a labor” was shortlisted for a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem by the Forward Arts Foundation (UK); in 2020, she became a Kundiman Fellow (deferred to 2021 due to COVID-19). Formerly, she was poetry editor of AGNI Magazine and art editor of At Length.
Writing about how the poems in Arrow came to be, Chakraborty notes: “What I knew I wanted to write was a book that lives in the aftermath of several forms of violence that have shaped my life and the lives of those I love. But it had to be an “aftermath” that also recognized that there is no “after” violence—it’s never left behind, and there’s always more in store in the present and the future for ourselves and others. Even the violence that is in the past is never “before”: our bodies remember it and our minds rehearse it.”
She is a graduate of Wellesley College, where she received her BA, and she received her doctorate in English with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Virginia, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in poetry and poetics. Previously, she has taught at Emory, the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, and North Carolina State University.
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(c) Ashley Chupp
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