Lynn Aarti Chandhok
Lynn Aarti Chandhok has been named the winner of the 2006 Levine Prize in Poetry, for The View from Zero Bridge. Chandhok was born and raised in Pittsburgh but spent childhood summers in Kashmir with her father's family. (Her mother is Jewish and a native of Brooklyn.) After graduation from Swarthmore College in 1985, she worked as a technical writer and then completed a master's degree in teaching at Tufts. She moved to Brooklyn in 1990 with her husband, and since then has worked as a high school English teacher and as a freelance writer. She has two daughters. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Republic, Tin House, The Antioch Review, The Hudson Review, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Sewanee Theological Review, and elsewhere. A chapbook, Picking the Flowers, is forthcoming from Aralia Press. Her work has been featured on Poetry Daily and will appear in a new Poetry Daily print anthology in Spring 2007.
THE VIEW FROM ZERO BRIDGE
BY LYNN AARTI CHANDHOK
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Levine Prize in Poetry 2006
It's the rich physicality of these poems that draws me to them, and it's their large reach that keeps me coming back. This is a poetry that embraces the problem of distance -- geographical, chronological, religious, cultural -- and the book gathers quiet force as it weaves between worlds as seemingly distant as Kashmir and Brooklyn, childhood and parenthood, sensuality and intellect, science and tradition. It's a delight to read a new book of poems that not only sings with a beautiful voice, but sings with remarkable wisdom, and sings to the heart. -- Contest judge Corrinne Clegg Hales
Still Life
A handful of peaches on a burlap sack,
the sack itself, asafoetida salt,
a clean mud room, two more sacks for two beds,
garlic and onions strung like bride's bouquets,
a garland drying in the entryway
whose husks will fall, whose seeds will plant themselves --
the ceiling thatched, smoked black, and dry as bone
even in this monsoon. Outside, the stone
blue patio, the succulents arranged
in rusting cans with red geraniums,
the pathway lined with sunflowers, beckoning
towards clumps of dahlia so dark red they're black --
all this, and still the peaches on the ground
look most like love, and take me by surprise.