Neil Genzlinger in the New York Times:
Meena Alexander, a poet and scholar whose writings reflected the search for identity that came with a peripatetic life, including time in India, Africa, Europe and the United States, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 67.
Her husband, David Lelyveld, said the cause was endometrial serous cancer.
In both prose and poetry Ms. Alexander, a longtime professor at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, explored themes of feminism, post-colonialism, dislocation, memory and more. She published numerous volumes of poetry, two novels and a memoir, “Fault Lines” (1993). Her writings were themselves the subject of a book, “Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander” (2005).
In their introduction, the editors of that volume, Lopamudra Basu and Cynthia Leenerts, credit Ms. Alexander with creating “a new hybrid poetic form, which fuses the Western Romantic lyric tradition with non-Western ones of Bhakti and Sufi poetry,” which came out of India. In one essay in the book, Jacqueline Wigfall describes “Fault Lines” as “a production of sound, color and texture that exceeds the function of autobiography, social history and political memoir.”
More here.