A Web Chapbook from The Literary Review   


Reetika Vazirani
Daddy always cautioned me
how many rupees it took to get
a dollar; and when I bought my first
Chanel lipstick, it was as if
I might have bought a cow in India.
It was always like that-what I
could have had were we in Delhi.
So that on holiday at Reno Road
he'd hint that Washington was not
like home. That's why he didn't want
me window-shopping downtown


Reetika Vazirani was educated at Wellesley College and the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. Her first book, White Elephants, won the 1995 Barnard New Women Poets' Prize. She received a 1994 "Discovery/The Nation" Award. Her individual poems have been widely published in such places as Agni, Antioch Review, Callaloo, Partisan Review, and Ploughshares.

She has received fellowships and awards from The Thomas J. Watson Foundation, Prairie Schooner, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and others. Most recently, she was given this year's Poets & Writers "Writers Exchange" award.

Reetika has been appointed Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College. She also has taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Oregon.

A Work by Reetika Vazirani:

  • GINA LOLLOBRIGIDA


    New Delhi, 1961

    She struck all of us
    city brides. In India we didn't discuss
    what she had in her. What we wanted
    more than magazine covers then haunted
    our closets & rooms, news of her & men
    with whom she was seen, "A Woman
    of Rome." To see her in lipstick
    only brought us to check
    our own. Her dark brow
    arched slightly more over her left eye. This too
    we copied as if all eyes had been centuries on Cleopatra's
    kohl. We drew brows in black strokes, black bras,
    a world. We dressed in perfume,
    petticoats, then saris. We did not understand
    what clothes made us lose. . . .
    We fixed our lips &
    practiced what it was to groom
    ourselves for for the tasting. We had just
    to study her beauty secrets at face value,
    a wish to be taken on.
    We were flawless but-not-too.
    Our disarray under was lust.



Selections from Reetika Vazirani's work:


Poetry, Part I

Poetry, Part II

Poetry, Part III






Email Reetika Vazirani