Visiting Hours of the World

An incantatory debut collection about postcolonial memory and transcontinental dreaming, Malvika Jolly's award-winning Visiting Hours of the World is a globe-spanning collection that moves across continents, histories, and intimate encounters in an epic voyage that releases us into a distinct and complete world.

In the traditions of Agha Shahid Ali, Italo Calvino, and Etel Adnan, and anchored by "Night Journeys" and the recurring figure of the "Dream Daughter," these poems trace migrations both literal and metaphysical--across cities, languages, histories, and borders--mapping a poetics of diaspora that resists fixed origin or return. Blending lyric intensity with a propensity for narrative, these poems draw upon mythology, family memory, and political history to map new geographies where women's lives and lineages are the central archive.

Tracing paths between New York, Chicago, California, New Delhi, Accra, and the Himalayas, these poems perform surreal maneuvers. In their dream-logic, an earthquake across the Hindukush collapses into the tenderness of a mother's hand, forest fires flood the skies with marigold pollen, water speaks to us with ancestral memory, desires change their flight-paths, and death arrives as a flock of birds. Throughout, the book insists on intimacy as a form of knowledge and dreams as a mode of survival, offering a feminist poetics of belonging.