Poems, essays, and articles available online.
SELECTED POEMS
“The B-Sides of the Golden Record: Track Twenty-One, ‘Ozymandias.’” Kenyon Review (Summer 2024). Link when available!
“The B-Sides of the Golden Record: Track Seven, ‘Love Poem with Prosopopoeia.’” Kundiman x The Offing (May 2024). Link when available!
Five poems from The B-Sides of the Golden Record (“Track Six: ‘The Interrogative Mood,’” “Track Eight: ‘Alienation of Affection,’” “Track Nine: ‘God,’” “Hidden Track,” “Track Ten: ‘Metaphor”). Massachusetts Review 64.3 (Fall 2023). “Hidden Track” is available for free online, as is audio of me reading it.
“The B-Sides of the Golden Record, Track Two: ‘Sounds of Human Labor.’” Poem of the Week on The Quarry from Split This Rock (January 13, 2023).
“Image 002.” “Ghosts in the Archive,” curated by Jennifer Lloyd,West Branch (Fall 2021).
“The B-Sides of the Golden Record, Track Five: ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.’” The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day (January 20, 2021).
“The B-Sides of the Golden Record, Track One: ‘The Canary Flies Toward the Mine.’” Small House Pamphlet Series: No. 2 (September 2020).
“Most of the Children Who Lived in This House Are Dead. As a Child I Lived Here. Therefore I Am Dead,” “Image 000,” “Image 001,” and “Image 007.” The Offing (15 July 2020).
“The B-Sides of the Golden Record, Track Three: ‘Some Flowers That Have Died.’” LARB Quarterly Journal: No. 26, Pop Issue (May 2020).
“Image 004.” POETRY (April 2020).
“Arrow” and “Essay on the Order of Time.” Blackbird 18.2 (November 2019).
“O.” Memorious 30 (July 2019).
"Essay on Thunder." The American Poetry Review (November/December 2018).
“Basic Questions.” Glass Poetry Review: Poets Resist, Midterm Election Edition (November 2018).
“Arrow.” Connotations Press: An Online Artifact’s A Poetry Congeries (November 2018).
"O Spirit," "O Spirit," "Essay on Joy," and "Essay on Devotion." The Rumpus (May 2018).
"Windows." POETRY (November 2017).
"Dear, beloved." POETRY (April 2017).
“Chorus.” BOAAT (January/February 2016).
“Bear, II.” The Journal 40.2 (Spring 2016).
“And death demands a labor.” Adroit 16 (Spring 2016). Reprinted on the Forward Foundation's website.
“Hound.” Witness XXIX.1 (Spring 2016).
“Luz.” Gulf Coast 28.1 (Winter/Spring 2016).
“Marigolds.” At Length (July 2015).
“Spring.” Boston Review (May/June 2015).
SELECTED ESSAYS
“The Shape of Things.” The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Blog (April 14, 2020).
“Every Atom - Reflections on Walt Whitman at 200: No. 45 (on “My words are of a question, and to indicate reality.” North American Review (July 14, 2019).
"The Trouble You Promised: Reading Tracy K. Smith." Los Angeles Review of Books (August 28, 2018). An essay tracking four of the main poetic obsessions (authority, education, need, and love) of Tracy K. Smith, across her four books of poems.
"Carried Off to the World's End: A Study of Alice Oswald in Five Parts." Los Angeles Review of Books (January 3, 2017).
"Violet and Violent: A Conversation with Melissa Green." Los Angeles Review of Books (February 21, 2016).
"Night Out of Many Many Bright Roses." Rain Taxi Review of Books (Summer 2015). “What started out as a routine review takes a turn for the personal as Chakraborty reads the poems of Rilke in the light of her younger sister’s death.”
SCHOLARSHIP
“Brownness and the Ontology of Analogy.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 10.1 (Spring 2024). Links to Project Muse; please feel welcome to email if interested in a PDF.
Abstract: This article theorizes the concept of “compulsory analogy” as a reiterated, compelled speech act that fundamentally structures Brown ontology within White supremacy. The author contends that White interpellation forces Brown subjects to define themselves via similitude to position Brownness both as Whiteness’s subordinate and as Whiteness’s ally in perpetuating anti-Blackness. Subsequently, the essay pivots to considering the function of literary analogies in the work of the contemporary South Asian poet Kazim Ali, suggesting that it offers a model for an analogical logic that vehemently rejects compulsory analogy in favor of a Brown relationality that confounds White inscription and is predicated upon anti-racist alliances between Brown and Black subjects.
“Anthropocene Ethics and its Lapses: Lyric Eros, Racism, and the Example of Sylvia Plath’s Bees.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE) 28.3 (Autumn 2021). Links to OUP Online; please feel welcome to email if interested in a PDF.
Abstract: Much recent work in ecology studies argues that eros decenters the human. Using Sylvia Plath’s bee poems as a case study, in this essay I argue that grappling with eros in poetry (often evoked, but rarely considered, in such discourse) yields an ecological ethics capable of contending with our ugliest ideologies. Although Plath’s poems are replete with interspecies desire, that desire is intertwined with racist rhetoric. To read Plath’s bee poems for an ethics of eros is to confront their racism. This essay argues that ethics in the Anthropocene requires this confrontation due to the Anthropocene’s entanglements with not only interspecies violence and destruction, but intra-species violence among humans including genocide and racism.
“Poetic Networks Begin After Death.” College Literature 47.1 (Winter 2020, Special Issue: Poetry Networks). Links to Project Muse; first page is available, the rest requires login. Please feel welcome to email me if interested in a PDF.
From the final paragraph: “One of the most significant aims of the legibility toward and upon which modern power operates, argues Foucault, is an obsession with life. Vitalism has become the modus operandi and the objective of the ‘power network’ which ‘endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations’ ([1976] 2012, 137). ‘It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race’ writes Foucault, ‘that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed’ ([1976] 2012, 137). Yet [Lucille] Clifton’s spirit writing shows us the possibility of a network that does not rely on life so much as it is predicated upon death—and, specifically, upon deaths that are not viewed as foreclosures of connectivity and therefore cannot function as the specter from which we must seek, at all costs, to protect ourselves.”
Description: In this cluster of essays for Modernism/modernity, each contributor selected a keyword to guide their examination of the relation between sexual violence in The Waste Land and our contemporary modes of attention to sexual violence, as in the #MeToo movement. My contribution uses the keyword “No” to consider how The Waste Land can help us complicate how rhetorics of certainty and rhetorics of ambiguity signify in the context of sexual assault. This publication is open-source: please follow the above link to read my essay, and please take a look at the cluster as a whole. This essay marks the genesis of my second academic book project, which will tackle, broadly, the problem of reading poetic texts that neither support nor unambiguously denounce gender-based violence, which I see as an outgrowth of long-standing literary debates regarding the ethics and affects of reading.
“Of New Calligraphy: Seamus Heaney, Planetarity, and Lyric’s Uncanny Space-Walk.” Cultural Critique 104 (Summer 2019). Links to Project Muse; first page is available, the rest requires login. Please feel welcome to email me if interested in a PDF.
Abstract: In the middle of the twentieth century, the Western cultural imaginary transitioned between two formulations of the uncanny. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes this shift as one “from vagina to planet”: due to the newfound view of Earth from space in the late 1960s, Freud’s conceptualization of the body of the cisgender, childbearing woman as an uncanny figure shifts to a pervasive sense that the uncanny signifier par excellence is the planet Earth itself. This essay interrogates this shift and finds its most fruitful figuration takes place in poetics. First, it examines how both uncannies function interdependently in midcentury print and media culture. It then turns to the work of Seamus Heaney as an example of poetic rhetoric’s potential for uncanny estrangement, and explores the consequences of such estrangement on ideas of kinship. I suggest that Heaney’s work positions lyric as the ultimate uncanny space, inviting us to re-envision the nature of lyric engagement with materiality and embodiment.