Aimee Nezhukumatathil Named 12th Westminster Poet

The Westminster School English Department has announced that Aimee Nezhukumatathil has accepted an invitation to become the 12th Westminster Poet. Students and teachers will read and study Nezhukumatathil’s three books of poetry throughout 2011-2012 in preparation for her visit to campus April 15-17. Nezhukumatathil will be the first Westminster Poet to spend two full days on campus.

Although she will be the youngest Westminster Poet ever, she comes highly recommended and much-honored. Her first book “Miracle Fruit” (2003) won Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year Award and the Tupelo Press Judge’s Prize in Poetry, while her second book “At the Drive-In Volcano” (2007) won the Balcones Prize. Her third book “Lucky Fish” (2011) has garnered much praise also, including this from former Westminster Poet Dorianne Laux, “Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s latest poems are again far-reaching in geographic scope and linguistic imagination…sensual dreamscapes of allegory and fable, but with a righteous bite and the razor sting of perception.”

From the beginning, Nezhukumatathil has been interested in exploring her “three worlds” — her mother’s native Philippines, her father’s native India and her own contemporary America — in poems that can be delicate and whimsical at times, but also emotionally honest and passionate. Apparently Nezhukumatathil has an insatiable curiosity about what Publisher’s Weekly calls “the small mechanisms of being, whether natural, personal, or imagined.”

Nezhukumatathil was born in Chicago and educated at the Ohio State University. She was the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and is currently an associate professor of English at SUNY Fredonia, where she has received several awards honoring her outstanding teaching.

Former Westminster Poet Naomi Shihab Nye praises the “nubby layerings of lines, luscious textures and constructions” in Nezhukumatathil’s poems and concludes her review of “At the Drive-In Volcano” by saying, “Poems like these revive our souls. Read them, then say her glorious name over and over again like a charm of syllables — it’s a poem of its own.”

Additional information about Nezhukumatathil is available on her Web site at http://www.aimeenez.net/ and two of her poems are below.

The honeymoon is over

and we find a dead lizard

in our luggage. An anole, actually —

its neckflesh swollen and dry,

     like a single papery

     bougainvillea flower pinned

     to its tiny neck. Anoles crept

     the walls of our island bungalow

but they all seemed so quick, so skittish.

Even the slightest movement

of mosquito netting sent them

scurrying behind a picture frame.

     So how to explain its presence

     here in Western New York, home of

     the chicken wing, the crazed

     football fans? Perhaps it too

wanted to travel far, escape rainy season

and the dumb huzz of mosquito, wanted

to know what it was like to perch on a single

dry berry and snatch a crunchy fly.

We measure our names the same.

Across the world, when children

call out for a friend, their mother,

their favorite white goat — they have

the same intonation, the same fall

and lilt to their voice, no matter

their language: Johhn-ee! Mah-ma!

Pehh-dro! My music teacher friend says

this is falling thirds: this is proof we spoke

the same language before Babel, that maybe

a tower did fall into rock and dust, gilding

our tongues slicker past any understanding.

We speak little wants, call little kisses

into our ears across beanfields, sand,

saltwater. Still, we sing the same songs.