Published in 2020
320 pages
Madhur Anand’s poetry has appeared in literary magazines across North America and in the anthology The Shape of Content: Creative Writing in Mathematics and Science. Her debut collection of poems A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes was published by McClelland & Stewart in April 2015 to international acclaim. “Anand’s attention to and ability to evoke explicit, exponential beauty in scientific and natural form are simply stunning” (Publishers Weekly). Anand completed her Ph.D. in theoretical ecology at Western University, and is currently a professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of Guelph and interim Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation.
What is this book about?
An experimental memoir about Partition, immigration, and generational storytelling, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma, using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present.
We begin with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, chanting Hai Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they are drawn together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns and in crowded city apartments. And when we turn the book over, we find the daughter’s tale—we see how the rupture of Partition, the asymmetry of a father’s leg, the virus of a mother’s rage, makes its way to the next generation.
Told through the lenses of biology, physics, history and poetry, this is a memoir that defies form and convention to immerse the reader in the feeling of what remains when we’ve heard as much of the truth as our families will allow, and we’re left to search for ourselves among the pieces they’ve carried with them.
