Fault Lines: A Memoir (1993)

“Best Books of 1993” Publishers Weekly

Reissued in 2003

Praise for Fault Lines

“This new edition of Fault Lines shows us a poet intent on seeing herself straight … the narrative digs deeper into childhood and reexamines adulthood more painfully than its predecessor, but it carries the same magic of language and image.” — Jill Ker Conway

“Meena Alexander will be a part of the history of global culture. She knows how it looks, feels, tastes and sounds; how it creates and splits identity. Ten years ago, she published an extraordinary memoir, Fault Lines. Now with her habitual courage and subtlety and eloquence, she has interlaced the memoir’s words with new experiences, perceptions, pain, and visions. Fault Lines is faultless.” –Catherine R. Stimpson

“It is difficult to find words with which to preface Meena Alexander’s personal memories. As brilliantly captured in this new edition of Fault Lines, the memories are their own preface and introduction to a mesmerizing text culled from a life lived in fragments and migrations, a quest for nadu at home and in exile … Hers is a life where the present and past are simultaneous remembrances of each other. Her here, in India, Sudan, Europe, and the United States, is both everywhere and nowhere, a life of a ceaseless search for answers where the only certainty is the qalam she holds in her hand, with which she stitches together the fragments of her experience to make a healing wholeness. After all, as a writer she asks, what does she have but the raw materials of her own life?” — Ngugi wa Thiong’o , From the preface to the new edition of Fault Lines