Quickly Changing River: Poems

Meena Alexander

jan 2008 · Northwestern University Press

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Recipient, 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship

With her strong voice and precise language, Meena Alexander has crafted this visceral, worldly collection of poems. The experience she brings to the reader is sensual in many senses of the word, as she invokes bright colors, sounds, smells, and feelings. Her use of vivid imagery from the natural world—birds, lilies, horses—up against that from the world of humans—oppression, slavery, and violence—ties her work to the earth even as she works a few mystical poetic transformations.

In Alexander’s world, the songs of a bird can become the voice of a girl in a café and the red juice of mulberries can be as shocking as blood. When she focuses her attention on the cloth of a girl’s sari, the material of a woman’s life, or the blood in her veins, she speaks to the particular experience of women in the world. The women are vividly present—sometimes they are hidden or veiled, juxtaposed with open gardens in full bloom. It is difficult not to come away from Quickly Changing River without a new sense of the power and frailty of being alive.

Aletheia (Girl in River Water) First I saw your face, The your whole body lying still Hands jutting, eyelids shut Twin nostrils flare, sheer Efflorescebce when memory cannot speak- a horde of body parts glistening.

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Meena Alexander was born Mary Elizabeth Alexander in Allahabad, India on February 17, 1951. She received a bachelor's degree in English and French at the University of Khartoum in 1969 and a Ph.D. in English at the University of Nottingham in 1973. She taught at the University of Delhi, the University of Hyderabad, Fordham University, the City University of New York Graduate Center, and Hunter College. She wrote numerous volumes of poetry, two novels, and a memoir entitled Fault Lines. Her collections of poetry included Stone Roots, House of a Thousand Doors, Illiterate Heart, Poetics of Dislocation, Birthplace with Buried Stones, and Atmospheric Embroidery. Her novels included Nampally Road and Manhattan Music. She died from endometrial serous cancer on November 21, 2018 at the age of 67.