Come join us for June’s First Friday Poetry Reading and Signing featuring Anuradha Bhowmik, author of Brown Girl Chromatography. In a first for H&H as a venue, Anuradha will be sharing some projected visual poems with us, the inspiration for which she describes in brief here:
“While writing poems for the "Receipts from AOL Instant Messenger" series, I tried to create a form that pushed me to economize language while documenting trauma. I started writing the series months after AIM shut down in 2017. The poems incorporate early 2000s AIM slang, acrostics, and footnotes to enforce constraints on the number of words invested in detailing my memory and its association with American culture and pain.”
Anuradha Bhowmik is a Bangladeshi American poet and writer from South Jersey who currently lives and works in Philadelphia. She is a 2022 Kundiman Fellow and a 2018 AWP Intro Journals Project Winner in Poetry. Her poetry and prose have appeared in POETRY, the Sun, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Virginia Tech, and she has received awards from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Frost Place, among others.
" Brown Girl Chromatography is a wise manual of immigrant coming of age--a journey of ancestry and longing, an embrace of the past and a love song to the future. Anuradha Bhowmik speaks for all the brown girls who 'couldn't have/crushes in fourth grade, ' all of us who weren't 'white women/wearing lingerie in the glossy Macy's ad.' The speaker's journey through the minefield of popular culture, family responsibility, and maturation into an unmapped womanhood is handled with deft precision." -- Allison Joseph, author of Confessions of a Barefaced Woman
" Brown Girl Chromatography is pure fire, a slow burn to the center of desire. This is a book of longing, of brokenness, of makeup ('my second art, the perfect counterpart to my alter ego'), of wanting what you're not supposed to want and then constructing a world from it: 'This is my kingdom. / this is something I can control.' This is the most inventive book I've read in ages." -- Aaron Smith, author of The Book of Daniel