Praise

Ravi Shankar is now, truly, one of America’s finest younger poets.
            --Dick Allen, Connecticut poet laureate

Ravi Shankar’s poems are the verbal artifacts of a singular, many-sided and distinguished consciousness.
            --Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer Prize winner ​

Ravi Shankar is a postmodern flâneur. He wanders the world’s real and fictional gridded cities (or perhaps his astral body swoops high above them) and reports back. 
            --Amy Gerstler, National Book Critics Circle Award winner

Ravi Shankar’s Seamless Matter, when read as a whole, becomes nothing less than a praise song of our shared physicality, and of existence known, as it must be, under the scepter of time.
            --Jane Hirshfield, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets ​

It’s the language itself that does the trick--Shankar has a marvelous way of getting sound and phrasing to say both something and themselves.       
            —Cole Swensen, Guggenheim Fellow

Quirky, quizzical, inquisitive, by turns lyrical and meditative, Ravi Shankar's poems are guided by a strong intelligence toward resolutions that are both surprising and apt.
            —Gregory Orr, Rockefeller Fellow

Those to whom poetry is essential as the supreme use of language will ... have the opportunity to discover how the poet outreaches everything prose can illuminate in who and what we are, no matter where, on the map. Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar have boldly envisaged and compiled a beautiful achievement for world literature.
            --Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize winner

Ravi Shankar is a comic tragedian of philosophic collisions that occur at the intersection of memory, desire, perception, mutability, and language. Wild swoops made on the rheostat of diction and intricate consonantal echolocation enable the invention of this poet’s analogue for the metamorphic nature of what is past, or passing, or to come."
            —Alfred Corn, Guggenheim Fellow

Shankar collaborates with both painters and with other contemporary poets by finding the zone and bringing 'new forms of elasticity into being.'
            --Rae Armantrout, Pulitzer Prize winner ​

Reading and re-reading Ravi Shankar’s new collection was exhilarating. It’s an extraordinary exploration of the possibilities of collaboration.
            --Peter Orner, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

Shankar is a deeply philosophical poet who explores the major questions while attuned to the flux that is the very stuff of existence, and does so while moving from place to place—Illinois, Florida, Mumbai, Monteverde, and Hell's Kitchen—a Spiderman of the imagination
            —Gray Jacobik, William Meredith Award for Poetry winner

I am glad to have met the poet, Ravi Shankar, an individual whom I believe has and will continue to have an impact on more than just those who pass through his classroom.
            — Jessica Locke, Sequoya Review

Ravi Shankar's poems are filled with the pleasure of subjects dissolving into ideas, ideas folding into sounds, and sounds echoing familiar but elusive translocations.
            —Charles Bernstein, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Ravi Shankar knows how to play his chosen instrument, poetry, better than anyone, and he allows the instrument to play its soloist too.  
            — John Tranter, author of Urban Myths, Starlight, and Heart Starter.