Terrain Tracks

Description

In this debut prize-winning book of poetry, Purvi Shah explores migration and belonging. The book celebrates and riffs upon roots while opening up dialogues on contemporary American issues. Through movement on trains, in nature, and with family, Terrain Tracks charts the possibilities and edges of desire, love, hope, and our journeys for home.

“Purvi Shah’s Terrain Tracks explores journeys through space and time in beautifully sensuous lyrics charting the dislocations and locations of immigration, memory, love, and loss. Shah’s poems interweave India and New York, tracing the tastes and fragrances of cultural memories, conjuring the feel of New York in its everyday restless movement, tracking women’s lives from family, to work, to love, to transformation. She captures the forces of desire: for the lover traveling away or toward her. Her vivid images keep the reader near the concrete, making the abstract palpable. The imagination and the body’s touch share the same terrain in these moving poems.” — Harriet Davidson