Shadow Reader

Dharker (Luck Is the Hook) combines her poetry and drawings to deliver an exquisite and complex vision of exile, immigration, and adopted homelands. The poems go beyond simple ekphrasis to consider the power dynamics of language and text; in one entry responding to a 19th-century sketch by Queen Victoria (of the Maharaja Duleep Singh dressing the queen’s son, Prince Arthur, in a turban), the speaker reflects on what is missing: “We stand outside the line/ of vision, millions of us, day labourers/ in paradise gardens, who scurry underground/ so our shadows never mar the path of the king.” Dharker’s illustrations amplify the language of the poems to create potent visual metaphors, as in a series of drawings that depict threads of fabric on a traditional loom transforming into lines of poetry, suggesting an alchemical interplay between the two forms. Elsewhere, Dharker expresses concern over the use of technologies, such as drones, to construct images largely indifferent to human suffering: “All simplified./ Some live, some die.” This spectacular collection astonishes. (Aug.)