Sumita Chakraborty (she/her/hers) is a poet, essayist, and scholar. She is a Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, where she teaches in literary studies and creative writing. Her poetry has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2019, The Rumpus, and elsewhere; her essays and articles appear or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cultural Critique, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Modernism/modernity, and College Literature. In 2017, she received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation; she was shortlisted for a Forward Prize by the UK’s Forward Arts Foundation in 2018; she became a Kundiman Fellow in 2020. Her debut collection of poetry, Arrow, will be released in September 2020 from Alice James Books in the United States and Carcanet Press in the United Kingdom. Find her on Twitter at @chakrabsumita.

POETRY

“Most of the Children Who Lived in This House Are Dead. As a Child I Lived Here. Therefore I Am Dead" and Three Poems

By SUMITA CHAKRABORTY

Next to the black upright piano was a window, which looked out at the blue pansies, which were also sometimes purple, or yellow, like the word contusion.