Quickly Changing River Poems

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 worldbirds, lilies, horsesup against that from the world of humansoppression, slavery, and violenceties 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 cafe 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 presentsometimes they are hidden or veiled, juxtaposed with open gardens in full bloom. It is difficult not to come away fromQuicklyChanging Riverwithout a new sense of the power and frailty of being alive.Alexander, Meena is the author of 'Quickly Changing River Poems', published 2008 under ISBN 9780810124516 and ISBN 0810124513.