Brown Girl Chromatography: Poems

Anuradha Bhowmik’s life as a Bangladeshi-born American girl growing up as a first-generation immigrant in the United States gives shape to this debut collection. Brown Girl Chromatography interrogates issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in a post-9/11 America while navigating the poet’s millennial childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The poems follow Bhowmik as she learns about the cruelties in both American and Bangladeshi worlds without any guidance or instruction on how to survive these conflicting spheres. Any visible traces of her Bangladeshi life result in racial ridicule from her peers, while participating and assimilating into American culture is met with violence and abuse at home. As language and memory intersect, Bhowmik draws on pop culture and free association to examine her displacement from many angles and make meaning out of hurt.

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.