Fault Lines

A Memoir

Meena Alexander

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781558614543
• eBook ISBN: 9781558612822
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this evocative memoir, an acclaimed Indian poet explores writing, memory, and place in a post-9/11 world.

Passionate, fierce, and lyrical, Fault Lines follows one woman's evolution as a writer at home—and in exile—across continents and cultures. Meena Alexander was born into a privileged childhood in India and grew into a turbulent adolescence in the Sudan, before moving to England and then New York City. With poetic insight and devastating honesty, Alexander explores how trauma and recovery shaped the entire landscape of her memory: of her family, her writing process, and her very self.

This new edition, published on the two-year anniversary of Alexander's passing in 2018, will feature a commemorative afterword celebrating her legacy.

"Alexander's writing is imbued with a poetic grace shot through with an inner violence, like a shimmering piece of two-toned silk." —Ms. Magazine

"Evocative and moving." —Publishers Weekly

"One of the most important literary voices in South Asian American writing and American letters broadly writ, Meena Alexander's close examination of exile and migration lays bare the heart of a poet." —Rajiv Mohabir, author of The Cowherd's Son

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• “Looking for Nadu” Preface
• I. Fault Lines
• II. Book of Childhood
• “A House Filled with Women” Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also Available from the Feminist Press
• About the Feminist Press