Visiting Indira Gandhi's Palmist

Kirun Kapur's debut volume, Visiting Indira Gandhi's Palmist, ricochets from Partition-era India to Biblical pastorals, from American bars to the battlefield of the Bhagavad-Gita. By turns lyrical and narrative, unflinching and funny, the collection examines the harrowing collision of love and violence as it arises in families and nations. In these intense, beautiful poems, Kapur introduces us to an astonishing range of characters--mothers and fathers, princes and soldiers, lovers and daughters--as she sets out to explore our most fundamental stories and our most enduring human bonds.

"I'm thrilled to read a book that encompasses many phases of history, several religions, multiple myths, family stories, eros and terrorism, poetry and war, cultural clashes and cultural overlaps. What can possibly include such range without sprawl or stereotype? Poetry, and Kirun Kapur is a true, gifted poet." -- Robert Pinsky

"Where does a life truly begin? With birth in a new country? Or do we begin in the blood of our mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins, those who escaped horror and those who did not? In this absolutely superb collection of poems, Kirun Kapur captures the spiritual resonance of the past on the present, the pull of the old world beneath the push of the new, the leaving and the forgetting of what refuses to be forgotten. Visiting Indira Gandhi's Palmist is a stellar debut by a major new voice among us." -- Andre Dubus III

"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