In this extraordinary debut poetry collection, Proma Tagore's language is not the only thing that breaks explores the junctions between migration, race, the body, and desire. The poems in this book offer spaces to reflect on a variety of interlinking issues: the routes and brutal legacies of European colonization and imperialism; the interrelations between different experiences of migration or displacement and attendant geographies of water, land, place, or home; the politics of globalization, capitalism, settlement, and war; the real and symbolic maps of our many dislocations and journeys and, consequently, our multiply layered memories, dreams, and desires. Amidst the ongoing everyday realities of racism and war that have resulted from long-standing histories of colonization, language is not the only thing that breaks offers small, delicate moments of being--a personal and moving response to a world where many people experience profound levels of dehumanization.

november 14

--for Reena Virk

I am working out the vocabulary of my silence. --Muriel Rukeyser, "The Speed of Darkness"

in places where memory is impossible,
your story lives resilient and gives me new breath,
and your telling shatters the grammar of my silence,
as we begin working out the vocabularies and pathways
of voice.

in the unforgetting,
our rage will hold,
our words will refuse to be kept,
and i will not be consoled
tonight.