Visiting Indira Gandhi's Palmist

Poetry. Southeast Asia Studies. VISITING INDIRA GANDHI'S PALMIST by Kirun Kapur is the winner of the 2013 Antivenom Poetry Award published by Elixir Press.

"Kirun Kapur's debut volume VISITING INDIRA GANDHI'S PALMIST offers worlds of striking richness. From family lore marked by the 1947 partition of British India and the chaos that ensued, Kapur crafts a saga that is both personal and public. Her exploration of lives intersecting yet separated across time, culture, and continent reveals the many ways in which we carry, renounce, and rediscover the past. Kapur introduces us to an astonishing range of characters—a father who 'speaks five languages, quotes Frost as easily as Ghalib' ('Meat and Marry'); a mother and onetime nun who foreswore her 'Benedictine coif' for love ('Family Portrait, USA'); Cain and Abel of the Bible; Prince Arjuna of the Gita. At the heart of this quest, however, is an inquisitive mind examining our creation stories—personal, historical, and mythical. Through poems that are masterfully paced and densely layered, Kapur sets out to explore the tensions of our most basic human bonds: love and duty, violence and communion, family and nation."—Ned Balbo, contest judge

Kirun Kapur grew up in Hawaii and has since lived and worked in North America and South Asia. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, FIELD, The Christian Science Monitor and many other journals and news outlets. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and has been a poetry fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and McDowell Colony. Her poems were awarded the 2012 Arts & Letters / Rumi Prize for Poetry. She lives in Massachusetts, where she is the creative director of The Tannery Reading Series.