A Story of the World Before the Fence
A Story of The World Before The Fence is a lush, lyrical study of memory and history. These poems move deftly between the mystical and the known, inviting readers to travel backwards in time and forwards into themselves. Each of us struggles with the heavy-handedness of the past: its merciless shaping of the larger world and, of course, its unrelenting squeeze on our individual lives. Through intense reflection and beautiful invention, Leeya Mehta’s poems offer a kind of second sight.
–Tim Seibles
Cover Art: Vinod Balak, Circumambulation, 2019 (modified for the cover); Galerie Mirchandani+Steinruecke
Through centuries and across continents, Leeya Mehta evokes the transgenerational trauma of her ancestors, the Zoroastrian Parsis, to narratively structure an intimate, feminocentric experience of cultural and personal displacement. Her haunting poems, with their hard-won wisdom and exquisite imagery, serve as “a warning that the screws of love sit deep in the bone” despite—yet, perhaps, because of—the various forms of exile that complicate identities, relationships, and senses of place. A Story of the World Before the Fence acknowledges “how barriers can keep / wandering spirits separate from those they love,” but it nevertheless consoles us with the miracle that is laughter: a universal language that can still anchor us to one another and help us learn to forgive ourselves for what we have lost along the way.
–Randi Ward
Whether tracing the 10th century journey of religious refugees from Persia to a tender but continually ambivalent asylum in India or dwelling in the complicities and solidarities of our own era, this is a troubled look at belonging, where belonging is ever “like loving a corpse” among “history’s endless funerals”. Mehta’s compassion and clear, unhurried tone leaven the seriousness and ambition of the work’s intellectual horizons, and an emotional power and turbulence as deep as that in certain moods of its Anacostia River: “brown knot of sludge, // a dragon aching.”
–Vivek Narayanan
This remarkable collection begins with a series of poems that vividly recount a migration by boat, presumably carrying Mehta’s distant ancestors, from 10th century Iran to the west coast of India, the dazzle of arrival in a wildly fertile land and the enduring experience of being separate... Displacements, ancestral and personal, inform the whole of this collection. Poems set in India, Japan and Washington, DC richly describe scenes of personal and domestic life in a world, its ancient, informing faith would remind us, that is defined everywhere by individual, moral choice. The fence of the book’s title is a literal fence in Washington, erected to keep a herd of deer in place, but it is, as well, another figure of separation and mortality. At the close of the book’s final poem Mehta says, “It is time for me to forgive myself for what we have lost,” a consolation, certainly but yet another accepted responsibility.
—Michael Anania
Special thanks to Michael Anania, Ann Arbor, Vinod Balak, Diana Bolton, Joe DiNunzio, Bina Sarkar Elias, Marlena Lynn, Nancy Kiang, Nancy Mitchell, Vivek Narayanan, John Rosenwald, Rashmi Sadana, Tim Seibles, Dhun Sethna, Lee Sharkey, Avi Shroff, Jessika Trancik, Ryan Tuggle, Santosh Verma and Randi Ward. You are my angels.