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California. The prose poems narrate the stories
of the immigrant women’s lives that were drawn
from cultural artifacts such as photography, film
and paintings by the American artist, Francesco
Clemente. Leaving Yuba City won the Allen Gins-
berg Poetry Prize and parts of the volume received
the 1994 Pushcart Prize.
When Divakaruni realized that her poetry was
becoming more narrative, she turned to fiction
after taking a fiction writing class while she was
teaching at Foothill College. Publication of her
stories, however, was delayed by the birth of her
first child and her involvement with MAITRI, a
South-Asian domestic abuse victim help-line she
helped create. Fortunately, an instructor of Diva-
karuni’s, Tom Parker, took the initiative to gen-
erate interest at Anchor Publishing House. From
this initiation came the acclaimed ARRANGED
MARRIAGES (1995), which won the PEN Oakland
Josephine Miles Prize, the Bay Area Book Review-
ers Award and the American Book Award. All the
stories in the collection explore women’s, espe-
cially immigrant women’s, desires, fears, and cul-
tural anxieties.
Divakaruni then experimented with writing
novels. Her first, The MISTRESS OF SPICES (1997),
also explores the Indian immigrant experience,
but in a fantastical way, deploying tools of magic
realism and ideas of reincarnation. Her second,
Sister of My Heart (1999), evolved from an ear-
lier story entitled “The Ultrasound.” This novel
compares the divergent adult lives of two cous-
ins who were best friends as children, growing
up in an extended Indian family. Anju, one of
the cousins, migrates to the United States, while
Sudha, the other, stays in India. Divakaruni’s third
novel, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001),
continues the investigation of the Indian immi-
grant experience in the United States, delineat-
ing the loneliness, isolation and cultural anxiety
that immigrants suffer as they struggle to carve
out a niche in the new land. Her fourth novel,
The Vine of Desire (2002), is a sequel to Sister of
My Heart and continues examining Sudha and
Anju’s relationship after Sudha also immigrates
to the United States. Their friendship is threat-
ened when Anju finds another vine entangling
their lives—her husband’s suppressed desire for
her beautiful cousin and best friend Sudha. Her
last novel, Queen of Dreams (2004), like her first,
uses the paranormal to explore the lives of first-
generation Indian-Americans, who are culturally
all-American, and their relationships with their
Indian parents. Divakaruni is currently writing
children’s literature and has published two popu-
lar juvenile books, Neela: Victory Song (2002) and
The Conch Bearer (2003).
Sukanya B. SenapatiDogeaters Jessica Hagedorn (1990)
Dogeaters is the first novel of JESSICA HAGEDORN,
a Filipino-American poet, novelist, playwright,
performance artist and musician. The novel,
which takes its title from a derogatory slang term
for Filipinos, depicts a wide range of characters
from varied social backgrounds experiencing dif-
ferent forms of marginalization due to their class,
gender, and sexuality, among other things. Set in
Manila during the regime of dictator Ferdinand
Marcos and covering the period from 1956 to the
mid-1980s, it focuses on everyday lives frequently
overlooked by official records.
Mixing fiction and quotations from poems, his-
tory books, and newspapers, Hagedorn presents
multiple short vignettes narrated from the often
contrasting perspectives of multiple characters,
mostly female. There are three first-person nar-
rators: Rio Gonzaga, Joey, and Rio’s cousin Pucha.
Rio is a spirited schoolgirl from an upper-middle-
class background who wants to be a film director
and who immigrates to the United States with her
mother. Joey, a poor disc jockey, male prostitute,
and drug addict, ends up joining a revolutionary
group in the mountains. The open-ended novel
unravels how the lives of Rio and Joey become
loosely interwoven with those of a vast array of
characters including relatives, film stars, star wan-
nabes, a beauty queen, politicians, the country’s
First Lady, and insurgent groups. Pucha’s inter-
vention in the penultimate vignette of the novel64 Dogeaters