Sing, Slivered Tongue: An Anthology of South Asian Women’s Poetry of Trauma in English

＂As an eyewitness to Partition violence, I am happy to endorse this collection of trauma poems edited by Lopamudra Basu and Feroza Jussawalla. Women speaking on trauma need to be given voice, recognition, and exposure.＂
-Bapsi Sidhwa, author of Cracking India

＂I was deeply moved by this wonderful collection of diasporic women’s voices, writing from the depths of their hearts, expressing truth and pain, but also resolution and triumph. An inspiring and authentic anthology, well worth the reader’s time and attention.＂
-Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of Palace of Illusions and The Last Queen

＂Sing Slivered Tongue is a chorus of women’s voices from the South Asian diaspora that speaks to the traumatic and triumphant realities of worlds severed, shattered, and somehow still surviving. This collec tion is an impressive contribution to the ancient tra ditions of women poets whose words inform not only our view of the world, but ourselves and each other through time and place.＂ -Kao Kalia Yang, Author of Where Rivers Part and What God is Honored Here.

＂This important collection is a correction of the often forcible, gendered and cultural silencing of wom en’s voices; the poets included recast known stories, honor victims of violence and of history itself, and share their own embodied traumas, locating strength and resilience in the intergenerational act of survival Through ruptures and fragments, metaphors and renaming, the poems gathered in Sing, Slivered Tongue make palpable the ways trauma, pain, and loss hold power to disrupt one’s very sense of self-but also show the ways in which poetry can shine light into those fissures and create a new kind of wholeness that is simultaneously scarred and beautiful.＂
-Ann E. Wallace, PhD, 2023-2024 Poet Laureate of Jersey City, NJ, author of Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul (Kelsay Books, 2024).

Trauma, particularly that of women, has typically been relegated to silence and oblivion.

Sing, Slivered Tongue is a collection of poetry by women from South Asia writing on trauma. The title of the volume is a reference to the ancient legend of Khona, a wise woman whose tongue was severed by her envious father-in-law. The volume gathers together the voices and experiences of sixty-eight women from various South Asian communities, in an attempt to explore the subject of trauma through a gendered lens. Lopamudra Basu and Feroza Jussawalla, the volume’s editors, ensure that the preconceived notion of silence around women’s trauma is subverted, even as the verses they bring together explore the enduring sensations and experiences of trauma, loss, and grief from across South Asia.