Having greatly admired Alexander's volume of poetry Raw Silk, I was eager to read her story. This is a memoir in two parts. The first, published in 1993, recounts the poet's childhood in India and Khartoum, her eventual marriage to East Asian historian David Lelyveld, her immigration to America, and her professional life as an English professor. She talks of cultural displacement, not only by nation but by generation: her mother's life was far more constricted than her own. Since she is a poet, Alexander's language is lyrical and evocative, and I learned a lot of the vocabulary of Indian tradition--in food, clothing, ritual and more.

The second part, published in 2003, is basically a series of shocks. She recounts September 11 and its aftermath (she was teaching at the CUNY Graduate Center on 5th Avenue in NYC at the time) and then describes her discovery, late in life, that her adored grandfather sexually abused her as a child. It's hard to fathom the surfacing of this repressed memory, mainly because in the first part, the grandfather is so adored; such a beloved part of her childhood. It's a mystery, upsetting to ponder.

Alexander died in November 2018, aged 67. A good poet, gone from us. ( )

from jill kerr conway
childhood ok but the whole thing was kind of disorganized like she wrote it as she thought of it.
too much about the agony of displacement and writing poetry. ( )