eavers Literary Review Vol 1, Number 2 (2025), published by Weavers Press in San Francisco, has been accompanying me for quite some time now. The issue, dedicated to writings by South Asian Americans and others, celebrates diversity while resisting the pressure to fit into the category of market-friendly books. Instead, it offers the readers a glimpse into a space where political urgencies and literary forms can coexist.

Moazzam Sheikh sets the tone with unusual candour. While refusing to impose a formal theme, the editor acknowledges that several contributions turn towards the ongoing genocide in Gaza, suggesting that American literature is passing through a “watershed moment.” The claim is measured rather than declarative. Silence, the editorial note argues, cannot remain neutral; engagement will instead “test fortitude and imagination.”

This ethical framing matters because the work that follows does not resort to slogans or polemics. It attends instead to the lived textures of exile, precarity, memory and survival, concerns that move across borders and identities without flattening them into a single narrative. Global crises, the issue suggests, are not experienced as abstractions but as ruptures: as silence, dispossession and the brutal logic of displacement.

The opening poems, particularly those by Paul Catafago and Devi Laskar, establish a tone of intimate urgency. Catafago’s The Razor’s Edge moves between Jerusalem, the Holocaust and the Nakba, carefully refusing false equivalence while holding the fragility of human life within a shared ethical frame. “It’s a thin line; / such a / thin line,” the poem begins, before insisting that “anybody can / fall through the / cracks / any time.” Exile here is not a metaphorical gesture but a repeatedly named condition – Palestinian, Jewish, Kurdish, Syrian – until the reader is confronted with the unsettling proposition: “I am the exile, I am you.”

Laskar’s poems turn their attention to contemporary racial violence and disappearance in the United States, where highways, social media timelines and missing-person notices become quiet indictments of privilege and neglect. “There is no peace in waiting,” she writes – a line that refuses easy consolation. Her language is spare yet exacting, alert to the collision between public rhetoric and private grief.

One of the strengths of Weavers Literary Review is its prose selections, particularly those that resist Eurocentric modes of exoticism. Maura Finkelstein’s nonfiction essay, Solid, Settling, moves between abandoned houses in Iceland and the crumbling chawls of Mumbai, drawing a sharp parallel between post-industrial ruin and postcolonial precarity. These are not romanticised ruins but “lively” spaces, dense with memory, labour and loss. Reading the essay, I was reminded of my nani’s home, once tall and elegant, now slowly slipping into decay, yet still carrying the quiet weight of lived histories. Finkelstein’s reflections on displacement feel both personal and structural, attentive to how bodies, like buildings, absorb the slow violence of economic collapse.

Sarita Sarvate’s Guerrillas opens with tense, almost claustrophobic immediacy. A young girl walks beneath an unrelenting sun, asphalt burning through her shoes, trees long erased from the landscape. This is speculative fiction shaped by environmental degradation, unfolding alongside militarised borders, failing healthcare systems and the unchecked advance of war technologies. Sarvate is acutely alert to how political rhetoric and weapons development accelerate disposability, particularly of brown, disabled and female bodies.

Its strength lies in its refusal to settle on a single story of South Asian or Diaspora experience.

Elizabeth McKenzie’s Huff offers a cooler, more restrained critique of the same world. Its power lies in understatement, allowing the banal language of transactions and ambition to reveal how capitalism steadily renders human life expendable. There is no dramatic rupture here, only a gradual suffocation. The absence of overt moral judgment mirrors a reality in which indifference has become habitual.

Questions of resilience surface in Hannah Gilberg’s The Harpsichordist, which deliberately avoids the romance of triumph. Survival is practiced daily and often invisibly, through art that serves both as refuge and assertion. Coexistence, the story suggests, is not harmony but negotiation, and the peace honours the quiet defiance required to endure without self-erasure.

Form itself becomes a vessel of memory in Riverine, whose structure follows the meandering course of a river. Resisting linear narrative, the piece flows through collective memory and the subconscious, resurfacing fragments of history along the way. As a tribute to the river Sabarmati, it imagines water as an archive – holding within it histories of migration, violence, ritual and resistance.

A similar commitment to cultural and identity preservation runs through WARLI, which insists on the urgency of safeguarding historical narratives before they are whitewashed or commodified. Drawing on indigenous visual language, the piece frames storytelling as an act of resistance. What is often dismissed as ‘folk’ or ‘local’ emerges instead as a durable record of identity and belonging, carried forward through memory and practice.

Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s Gadadharpur Women’s College grounds the collection in sharply observed realism. The story traces the dilemmas of a South Asian woman caught between professional ambition and the domestic responsibilities imposed upon her. Dreams are not so much abandoned as deferred and reshaped, often in ways that are quietly mourned. It recalled for me Dr Nadia Anjum’s poetry collection Woman.Woman@Pk, which lays bare how gender roles are internalised and endurance is framed as virtue.

In Portrait of a Party Man, Khem K Aryal shifts the focus to the lives of Nepalis in Texas, placing individual experience within wider socio-political and historical contexts. Migration here is neither romanticised nor reduced to economics alone; it is shaped by class, labour and the long afterlives of global inequality.

Weavers Literary Review does not claim perfection, nor does it seek it. Instead, it presents a gathering of narratives still in motion. Its strength lies in its refusal to settle on a single story of South Asian or Diaspora experience. There is no prescribed path through the issue, only an invitation to encounter the voices that speak most clearly to you.

Weavers Literary Review

Vol. 1, Number 2 (2025)

Editors: Moazzam Sheikh & Amna Ali

Publisher: Weavers Press, SF, 2025

Pages: 128

Price: $22

The reviewer is pursuing a post-graduate degree in education at University of Sussex