Whether writing ghazals or haibuns or unpacking the brutality of recent historical events, Mukherjee’s Dialect of Distant Harbors is a hybridic journey of storytelling, translations, reportage, lyrical unfoldings, and acts of witness. Though steeped in elegies for the dead, Mukherjee’s book is also praise-filled and empowering as she guides us through a detailed terrain of muslin petticoats, Weird Al, Calcutta heat, and “black / diamonds under bare feet,” as well as the rich odors of smeared chutney, woodsmoke, and ink. By the end, I feel Mukherjee’s “benediction / in the prickle of my scalp.”—Simone Muench, author of Orange Crush and Wolf Centos
Mukherjee’s masterful lyricism and storytelling complicate the immigrant narrative: “hundred is the sum of me . . . I have a hundred ways to be.” From her native Delhi to her adoptive Chicago, to New Zealand, Kuala Lumpur, and beyond, her lush, fierce, and tender poetic kaleidoscope refracts the self and sings of family and childhood, love and loss, and grapples with cultural identity, migration, womanhood, and race. If, as Czeslaw Milosz says, language is the only homeland, then to read this book is to rediscover that beloved yet elusive soil, and “live again / in that house on stilts, taste / the sharpness of anchovies / dried on bamboo vines.” —Angela Narciso Torres, author of What Happens Is Neither, Blood Orange, winner of the 2013 Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry, and To the Bone
Mukherjee takes us into worlds of food, fragrance, and “goddesses,” as well as “women / who bury infant girls in the ground, into / milk vats to drink until they drown.” A woman relaxes on a downtown sidewalk enjoying an impromptu concert by a street musician, and a mother arriving at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport is panicked when her nine-year-old son is led away for an inspection of his “foreign passport.” A poem takes its epigraph from the widely publicized gang-rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in Delhi in imagining a communal shawl “stained” by physical evidence and memory worn by all women who experience sexual violence. Mukherjee enjoys and honors languages, occasionally mixing in Bengali, her “magic chalice.” Reading this book is a sensory pleasure. —Debra Bruce, author of Survivors’ Picnic, What Wind Will Do, and Sudden Hunger, winner of the Carl Sandburg Award
