Leaving Yuba City: Poems

Leaving Yuba City, is a deeply affecting collection that explores images about India and the Indian experience in America - from the adventures of going to a convent school in India run by Irish nuns to the history of the earliest Indian immigrants in the United States.
Groups of interlinked poems are divided into six sections; peopled by many of the same characters, they explore a variety of themes. Divakaruni is particularly interested in how different art forms can influence and inspire each other, and there are series of poems based on paintings by Francesco Clemente; on photographs by Raghubir Singh; and on Indian films, including Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay! and Satyajit Ray's Ghare Baire. As with all of her writing, these poems deal with the experiences of women and their struggle to find identities for themselves.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni teaches creative writing at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California.