* Meena Alexander was compiling this book during the last year and last months of her life.* The poems on the life of Sarra Copia Sulam are accompanied by Alexander's own original artwork.* Meena Alexander is an important writer in the disciplines of contemporary poetry, Women's and Gender Studies, Asian American literature and studies in globa
In Praise of Fragments is a collection of various and inter-related works, including a sequence of poems written about Venetian Jewish poet Sarra Copia Sulam (1592¿1641), lyric essays about Venice, a suite of poems about Hyderabad, where Alexander lived for many years, and a series of brief sketches of memoir about her childhood in Kerala, the subject of her groundbreaking memoir Fault Lines. The writings are accompanied by a series of sumi ink drawings by Alexander and an afterword by Leah Suffrant.
"In Praise of Fragments? What kind of fragments? In Meena Alexander's In Praise of Fragments, images arrive piece meal, as wide ranging as the body, home/land, language/s, time/s-and as specific as a lavender net, a fan shaped palmyra tree, a shadow with two heads. Of course! After all, experience arrives as bits of thread, as shards of vessels, as misplaced jigsaw pieces-and not the whole cloth of exposition. And here is the beauty in this posthumous collection of four long sequences written in a small studio of her own-that the fragments make better sense than, say, a journalist's undertaking because the reader might experience the headiness of exploring the haunts of memory and the currents of present events. The reader can discover the charge of ache and exuberance. Whether your life has taken you on the routes of immigration, on return trips to visit a mother, or on a path to a seventeenth century poet, in reading these fragments, you will find yourself whole and renewed."-Kimiko Hahn
