This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart: A Memoir in Halves

An experimental memoir about Partition, immigration, and generational storytelling that weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present.

We begin before the red line is drawn across Punjab, with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, on the wrong side of the red line that has now been drawn, chanting Hey Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they are drawn together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns, on Indigenous reservations, in crowded city apartments. And when we turn the book over, we find the daughter's tale--we see how the rupture of Partition, the asymmetry of a father's leg, the virus of a mother's rage, makes its way to the next generation. Told through the lenses of biology, physics, history and poetry, this is a memoir that defies form and convention to immerse the reader in the feeling of what remains when we've heard as much of the truth as our families will allow, and we're left to search for ourselves among the pieces they've carried with them.

MADHUR ANAND's debut book of poems A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House Canada, 2015) was published to international acclaim ("in every measure a triumph", Publisher's Weekly starred review) and was listed by Canadian Broadcasting Agency as one of 10 all-time "trailblazing" poetry collections. The book was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. In 2015, CBC listed her as one of 12 "Writers to Watch". Her more recent award-winning poetry and prose has appeared in a number of magazines including The Puritan, Brick, Longreads.com, The New Quarterly, The Walrus and This. Her work won the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Fiction in 2017 and was a finalist for the Frontier Poetry Industry Prize in 2018. Anand has also published critical and scholarly work in ecopoetics and as a literary reviewer in The Literary Review of Canada and elsewhere. She edited the first anthology of contemporary ecological poetry, Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry (Scrivener Press) and currently serves as poetry editor for Canadian Notes and Queries, as Education Review Committee member of the Walrus, and on the Board of Directors for the Eden Mills Writers Festival.