Kin (Essays on Reckless Devotion)

The debut essay collection by a major poet that centers ecstasy, connection, and embodied curiosity from an expansive, diasporic perspective

After years of writing about South Asian American trauma and displacement in her acclaimed poetry collections Curb and Kith, Divya Victor turns to the essay to explore eros and sensuousness as shaping forces of subjectivity, political feeling, and aesthetic experience.

Victor imagines Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Chitra Ganesh jousting about nudes, describes how solidarity is learned in childhood games, writes to James Baldwin about Nabila Rehman, a Pakistani girl whose grandmother was killed in a US drone strike, explores what Lou Reed and A. R. Rahman teach us about the American dream, shows how Sylvia Plath and Malcolm X sculpted our vocabulary about racism, and conducts a study on gender and the form of the heap via an unexpected erotic relationship. Victor’s insights on art, film, photography, and music are fused throughout with bold commentary on gender, religion, whiteness and anti-Blackness, geopolitics and war.

With rich interiority and playful intelligence, Kin is a potent reimagining of the essay form. Victor attends to diasporic life in new registers—peals of joy, the blissful moan, gasps of surprise, and the susurrus of gossip and speculation—to enact kinship as rigorous and delightful, and to metabolize loss into astonishing formations of connection.