Reviews
The Many Uses of Mint
>Westerly Magazine review of The Many Uses of Mint
> Corrigan Literary Review, multimedia review
Golden Shovel
> The New York Times: Claudia Rankine on the Legacy of Gwendolyn Books
> PloughShare The Golden Shovel and the Power of Poetry
> Chicago Tribune
> The Manchester Review
> Lit Hub
> Asian Cha
> Tweetspeak
> Kenyon Review Editors Picks
“The Golden Shovel Anthology is quite simply a brilliant assembly of the work of poets I have admired for years and ones that I have just come to know and admire. I felt the thrill of creation reading it—the generative taking root, making me want to both read more and immerse myself in the form, in Brooks’s poems, and then write my own as these poets have done with remarkable range. This is an anthology that will be of great value to readers and writers of poetry for generations to come—just as Gwendolyn Brooks was, and is. What a way to honor her memory, her generosity of spirit, and her tremendous contributions to American poetry.”
--Natasha Trethewey, former US poet laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize
The Golden Shovel Anthology celebrates the life and work of poet and civil rights icon Gwendolyn Brooks through a dynamic new poetic form, the Golden Shovel, created by National Book Award–winner Terrance Hayes.
The last words of each line in a Golden Shovel poem are, in order, words from a line or lines taken from a Brooks poem. The poems are, in a way, secretly encoded to enable both a horizontal reading of the new poem and vertical reading down the right-hand margin of Brooks’s original. An array of writers—including Pulitzer Prize winners, T. S. Eliot Prize winners, National Book Award winners, and National Poet Laureates—have written poems for this exciting new anthology: Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Nikki Giovani, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Doty, Sharon Draper, and Julia Glass are just a few of the contributing poets.
The poems found here will inspire a diversity of readers, teachers, and writers of poetry while at the same time providing remarkable access for newcomers, making it ideal for classrooms. The Golden Shovel Anthology will also honor Brooks with publication in 2017, the centenary of her birth.
Language for a New Century
“This extraordinary, library-in-one volume: what a resource! Those to whom poetry is essential as the supreme use of language will find the work of many poets they have never before come to, and those readers who have limited themselves to prose 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. Assembled here is not the Tower of Babel, but the astonishment and subtlety inherent in many languages and their experimental modes to expand the power of words. The introductions to each section offer perceptions engagingly against which to place one’s own readings of the poems. The editors have boldly envisaged and compiled a beautiful achievement for world literature.”
--Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
A symphonic sweep of beckoning cries, praises, prayers, curses, ruminations and revelations. An ensemble rich with diverse voices, here the old and the new converge, and something wholly human and futuristic emerges—something that possesses a robust lyricism—shining its light, its illuminated certainty into the twenty-first century. This marvelous anthology assembles a multitude of voices intent on a purposeful, deep singing.
--Yusef Komunyakaa, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Read Language for a New Century as you would a field guide to the human condition in our time, a poetic survival manual. . . . If, as Milosz wrote, “posterity will read us in an attempt to comprehend what the twentieth century was like,” then this collection will be read to know the beginning of the twenty-first.”
--Carolyn Forché
This anthology stays true to the numinous power of poetry and the cultures that take it up as their own. The result is a vast, beautifully fashioned mosaic of indelible, variegated pieces.
--San Francisco Chronicle
This ambitious yet accessible gathering of hundreds of poets from various parts of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, America and elsewhere is likely to excite poetry fans as well as those new to poetry….It is packed with treasures.
--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
This ocean of verse from dozens of poets from around the world includes English-language work as well as translations from Hebrew, Arabic and various Asian languages. The result is an anthology that offers a smorgasbord of unfamiliar — but often delicious — work that, in its essence, defines the multicultural experience of life.
--NPR, All Things Considered
While it's safe to say the twenty-first century has so far not been a great time for American diplomacy…a handful of new poetry anthologies…offer proof that American poetic diplomacy might be entering a new golden age.
--Poets & Writers
A feast of hundreds of courses, this new book of poetry in translation looks away from the Occident towards the work currently being produced in the east. It is a rich addition to Norton’s collection of meticulously produced verse anthologies.
--Financial Times
Younger poets Tina Chang, Nathalie Handel, and Ravi Shankar took on the daunting task of assembling this remarkable collection. A beautiful, sturdy, 700-page volume, well-indexed and annotated. A pleasure to this collection is that it's arranged in themes, rather than by geography. This lets readers look at exile, at childhood, at conflict in a larger, more unified context.
--Publishers Weekly online
Among contemporary poetry's most notable trends is a post-9/11 surge in translation. The blockbuster anthology published during the past six months is Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry From the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond devotedly compiled by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar.
--Village Voice
Language for a New Century is a book of many lenses, many windows, and as many mirrors as a Gujarati tapestry. It holds poems from Urdu, Hebrew, Punjabi, Marathi, Uzbek, Japanese, and Arabic. We find Sufis, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Catholics, Jews. We find homelands and new lands and the mystery and asymmetry of worlds viewed in travel.
--Barnes and Noble
For poetry lovers who use anthologies as encyclopedias and as kaleidoscopes of surprise, these books are a treasure.
--Bloomsbury Review
What the poets share is a delicate balancing act between a respect for centuries of tradition and the breakneck speed of modern society.
--Washington Post
This rich collection of poetry gives the reader a feeling of the pulse of the East and is a good guide to the human condition in our time. It makes available to the West part of humanity’s poetry that is often overlooked or relegated to literary specialists, and it highlights the oneness of the human family and its desires, fears, and hopes. It is a good addition to the series of Norton anthologies and similar works and, together with them, it helps bring world literature closer to becoming better known and more fully appreciated.
--Digest of Middle East Studies
The fact that there were three different editors with different tastes strengthens this anthology by allowing for an even more diverse array of poetic styles and sensibilities. Language for a New Century possesses the beauty of a freshly assembled five-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. I highly recommend Language for a New Century, which I think is an essential work for anyone, and not just anyone interested in Asian-American poetry, to have on their bookshelves.
--Asian American Poetry
This rich collection of poetry from Asia, the Middle East, and other parts of the world, fills a huge gap in our cultural heritage. It is a formidable achievement, and an important contribution to our education.”
--Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States
An indispensable collection.
--Ian McMillan, Host, The Verb, BBC, Radio3
It's a literary anthology no college-level collection should be without.
--Midwest Book Review
This extraordinary, library-in-one-volume: what a resource! Those to whom poetry is essential as the supreme use of language will find the work of many poets they have never before come to, and those readers who have limited themselves to prose 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. Nine thematic groupings of the work bring us wonderfully, almost perilously close to ultimate experience in childhood, love, war, exile, the inextricable relations between politics and the personal, the tragic and the ironic, the wisdom in sorrow and humor, that only the most intense imagination can plumb. That of the poet. The realm of imagination is one. This anthology gives entry to its vast expression in the Middle East and Asia, including the changing sensibilities of poets in the ever-growing world of immigration. Assembled here not the Tower of Babel, but the astonishment and subtlety inherent in many languages and their experimental modes to expand the power of words. The introductions to each section offer perceptions engagingly, against which to place one's own readings. The editors have boldly envisaged and compiled a beautiful achievement for world literature.
--Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer
Language for a New Century is a symphonic sweep of beckoning cries, praises, prayers, curses, ruminations and revelations. An ensemble rich with diverse voices, here the old and the new converge, and something wholly human and futuristic emerges—something that possesses a robust lyricism—shining its light, its illuminated certainty into the twenty-first century. This marvelous anthology assembles a multitude of voices intent on a purposeful, deep singing.
--Pulitzer Prize Winner, Yusef Komunyakaa
>Westerly Magazine review of The Many Uses of Mint
> Corrigan Literary Review, multimedia review
Golden Shovel
> The New York Times: Claudia Rankine on the Legacy of Gwendolyn Books
> PloughShare The Golden Shovel and the Power of Poetry
> Chicago Tribune
> The Manchester Review
> Lit Hub
> Asian Cha
> Tweetspeak
> Kenyon Review Editors Picks
“The Golden Shovel Anthology is quite simply a brilliant assembly of the work of poets I have admired for years and ones that I have just come to know and admire. I felt the thrill of creation reading it—the generative taking root, making me want to both read more and immerse myself in the form, in Brooks’s poems, and then write my own as these poets have done with remarkable range. This is an anthology that will be of great value to readers and writers of poetry for generations to come—just as Gwendolyn Brooks was, and is. What a way to honor her memory, her generosity of spirit, and her tremendous contributions to American poetry.”
--Natasha Trethewey, former US poet laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize
The Golden Shovel Anthology celebrates the life and work of poet and civil rights icon Gwendolyn Brooks through a dynamic new poetic form, the Golden Shovel, created by National Book Award–winner Terrance Hayes.
The last words of each line in a Golden Shovel poem are, in order, words from a line or lines taken from a Brooks poem. The poems are, in a way, secretly encoded to enable both a horizontal reading of the new poem and vertical reading down the right-hand margin of Brooks’s original. An array of writers—including Pulitzer Prize winners, T. S. Eliot Prize winners, National Book Award winners, and National Poet Laureates—have written poems for this exciting new anthology: Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Nikki Giovani, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Doty, Sharon Draper, and Julia Glass are just a few of the contributing poets.
The poems found here will inspire a diversity of readers, teachers, and writers of poetry while at the same time providing remarkable access for newcomers, making it ideal for classrooms. The Golden Shovel Anthology will also honor Brooks with publication in 2017, the centenary of her birth.
Language for a New Century
“This extraordinary, library-in-one volume: what a resource! Those to whom poetry is essential as the supreme use of language will find the work of many poets they have never before come to, and those readers who have limited themselves to prose 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. Assembled here is not the Tower of Babel, but the astonishment and subtlety inherent in many languages and their experimental modes to expand the power of words. The introductions to each section offer perceptions engagingly against which to place one’s own readings of the poems. The editors have boldly envisaged and compiled a beautiful achievement for world literature.”
--Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
A symphonic sweep of beckoning cries, praises, prayers, curses, ruminations and revelations. An ensemble rich with diverse voices, here the old and the new converge, and something wholly human and futuristic emerges—something that possesses a robust lyricism—shining its light, its illuminated certainty into the twenty-first century. This marvelous anthology assembles a multitude of voices intent on a purposeful, deep singing.
--Yusef Komunyakaa, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Read Language for a New Century as you would a field guide to the human condition in our time, a poetic survival manual. . . . If, as Milosz wrote, “posterity will read us in an attempt to comprehend what the twentieth century was like,” then this collection will be read to know the beginning of the twenty-first.”
--Carolyn Forché
This anthology stays true to the numinous power of poetry and the cultures that take it up as their own. The result is a vast, beautifully fashioned mosaic of indelible, variegated pieces.
--San Francisco Chronicle
This ambitious yet accessible gathering of hundreds of poets from various parts of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, America and elsewhere is likely to excite poetry fans as well as those new to poetry….It is packed with treasures.
--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
This ocean of verse from dozens of poets from around the world includes English-language work as well as translations from Hebrew, Arabic and various Asian languages. The result is an anthology that offers a smorgasbord of unfamiliar — but often delicious — work that, in its essence, defines the multicultural experience of life.
--NPR, All Things Considered
While it's safe to say the twenty-first century has so far not been a great time for American diplomacy…a handful of new poetry anthologies…offer proof that American poetic diplomacy might be entering a new golden age.
--Poets & Writers
A feast of hundreds of courses, this new book of poetry in translation looks away from the Occident towards the work currently being produced in the east. It is a rich addition to Norton’s collection of meticulously produced verse anthologies.
--Financial Times
Younger poets Tina Chang, Nathalie Handel, and Ravi Shankar took on the daunting task of assembling this remarkable collection. A beautiful, sturdy, 700-page volume, well-indexed and annotated. A pleasure to this collection is that it's arranged in themes, rather than by geography. This lets readers look at exile, at childhood, at conflict in a larger, more unified context.
--Publishers Weekly online
Among contemporary poetry's most notable trends is a post-9/11 surge in translation. The blockbuster anthology published during the past six months is Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry From the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond devotedly compiled by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar.
--Village Voice
Language for a New Century is a book of many lenses, many windows, and as many mirrors as a Gujarati tapestry. It holds poems from Urdu, Hebrew, Punjabi, Marathi, Uzbek, Japanese, and Arabic. We find Sufis, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Catholics, Jews. We find homelands and new lands and the mystery and asymmetry of worlds viewed in travel.
--Barnes and Noble
For poetry lovers who use anthologies as encyclopedias and as kaleidoscopes of surprise, these books are a treasure.
--Bloomsbury Review
What the poets share is a delicate balancing act between a respect for centuries of tradition and the breakneck speed of modern society.
--Washington Post
This rich collection of poetry gives the reader a feeling of the pulse of the East and is a good guide to the human condition in our time. It makes available to the West part of humanity’s poetry that is often overlooked or relegated to literary specialists, and it highlights the oneness of the human family and its desires, fears, and hopes. It is a good addition to the series of Norton anthologies and similar works and, together with them, it helps bring world literature closer to becoming better known and more fully appreciated.
--Digest of Middle East Studies
The fact that there were three different editors with different tastes strengthens this anthology by allowing for an even more diverse array of poetic styles and sensibilities. Language for a New Century possesses the beauty of a freshly assembled five-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. I highly recommend Language for a New Century, which I think is an essential work for anyone, and not just anyone interested in Asian-American poetry, to have on their bookshelves.
--Asian American Poetry
This rich collection of poetry from Asia, the Middle East, and other parts of the world, fills a huge gap in our cultural heritage. It is a formidable achievement, and an important contribution to our education.”
--Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States
An indispensable collection.
--Ian McMillan, Host, The Verb, BBC, Radio3
It's a literary anthology no college-level collection should be without.
--Midwest Book Review
This extraordinary, library-in-one-volume: what a resource! Those to whom poetry is essential as the supreme use of language will find the work of many poets they have never before come to, and those readers who have limited themselves to prose 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. Nine thematic groupings of the work bring us wonderfully, almost perilously close to ultimate experience in childhood, love, war, exile, the inextricable relations between politics and the personal, the tragic and the ironic, the wisdom in sorrow and humor, that only the most intense imagination can plumb. That of the poet. The realm of imagination is one. This anthology gives entry to its vast expression in the Middle East and Asia, including the changing sensibilities of poets in the ever-growing world of immigration. Assembled here not the Tower of Babel, but the astonishment and subtlety inherent in many languages and their experimental modes to expand the power of words. The introductions to each section offer perceptions engagingly, against which to place one's own readings. The editors have boldly envisaged and compiled a beautiful achievement for world literature.
--Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer
Language for a New Century is a symphonic sweep of beckoning cries, praises, prayers, curses, ruminations and revelations. An ensemble rich with diverse voices, here the old and the new converge, and something wholly human and futuristic emerges—something that possesses a robust lyricism—shining its light, its illuminated certainty into the twenty-first century. This marvelous anthology assembles a multitude of voices intent on a purposeful, deep singing.
--Pulitzer Prize Winner, Yusef Komunyakaa
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The Autobiography of a Goddess
Eighth century Tamil poet and founding saint Andal is believed to have been found as a baby underneath a holy basil plant in the temple garden of Srivilliputhur. As a young woman she fell deeply in love with Lord Vishnu, composing fervent poems and songs in his honor and, according to custom, eventually marrying the god himself. The Autobiography of a Goddess is Andal’s entire corpus, composed before her marriage to Vishnu, and it cements her status as the South Indian corollary to Mirabai, the saint and devotee of Sri Krishna. The collection includes the Thiruppavai, a song still popular in congregational worship, thirty pasuram (stanzas) sung before Lord Vishnu, and the less-translated, rapturously erotic Nacchiyar Thirumoli.
Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Ravi Shankar serve as master translators for the volume, employing a radical new method for that revitalizes classical and spiritual verse by shifting it into a new contemporary poetic idiom in English. Many of Andal’s pieces are translated collaboratively, giving readers multiple perspectives on the rich sonic and philosophical complexity of classical Tamil. Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess is a powerful expression of female sexuality in the Indian spiritual tradition—one newly available to a general readership in this fresh new translation. A powerful expression of female sexuality in the Indian spiritual tradition, in a breathtaking new translation.
…a translation maven’s dream.’
--John Stratton Hawley, Columbia University
‘This book is a gatewayto a literature that dwarfs. Western bookshelves,an erotic metaphysics aPsychology of the absolute. To open these pages is to enter “the holy city of Arankaram”, “Dvarka”, “that kingdom of interconnecting lights”, the human mind refusing any limit. PriyaSarukkaiChabria and Ravi Shankar, remarkable poets in their own right, have taken us on a fascinating journey.’
--Dennis Nurkse, poet
‘We emerge bloodied and honeyed by Andal’s surrender to her Lord. PriyaSarukkaiChabria and Ravi Shankar, highly accomplished poets, rise to meet Andal with grace and fire, and transport her words, her worlds, to us, unafraid of its immeasurable depths. Theirs is as much a feat of courage and love as of craft and ingenuity.’
--Karthika Nair, poet
‘PriyaSarukkaiChabria and Ravi Shankar offer us a haunting chamber of echoes, and a figure that segues between mystic and metaphor, woman and deity. The result is verse that swirls between sensuality and sacred delirium – and a profusion of Andals, edgy, erotic and darkly ecstatic.’
--Arundhati Subramaniam, poet
Ninth-century Tamil poet and founding saint Andal is believed to have been found as a baby beneath a holy basil plant in the temple garden of Srivilliputhur.As a young woman she fell deeply in love with Lord Vishnu, composing fervent poems and songs in his honour and, according to custom, eventually marrying the god himself.The Autobiography of a Goddess comprises Andal’s entire corpus, composed before her marriage to Vishnu, and cements her status as the South Indian corollary of Mirabai, the saint and devotee of Sri Krishna.The collection includes Tiruppavai, a song still popular in congregational worship, thirty pasuram (stanzas) sung before Lord Vishnu, and the less- translated, rapturously erotic NacchiyarTirumoli.
PriyaSarrukaiChabria and Ravi Shankar employ a radical method in this translation, breathing new life into this rich classical and spiritual verse by rendering Andal in a contemporary poetic idiom in English. Many of Andal’s pieces are translated collaboratively; others individually and separately. The two approaches are brought together, presenting a richly layered reading of these much-loved classic Tamil poems and songs.
UNION: 50 Years of Writing from Singapore and 15 years of Drunken Boat edited by Alvin Pang and Ravi Shankar
> The Rumpus
> Australian Book Review
Deepening Groove
> Rain Taxi
Other reviews
> Interview by The Missing Slate
> Review by TM Krishna (Carnatic musician and winner of the 2016 Ramon Magsaysay award) in The Indian Express.
> Interview in The Hindu
> Excerpt in Scroll.in.
> Review by Arshia Sattar in Open Magazine
> Review by Sumana Roy in Scroll.in
> Preface to book by Mani Rao
> Interview by The Missing Slate
> Review by TM Krishna (Carnatic musician and winner of the 2016 Ramon Magsaysay award) in The Indian Express.
> Interview in The Hindu
> Excerpt in Scroll.in.
> Review by Arshia Sattar in Open Magazine
> Review by Sumana Roy in Scroll.in
> Preface to book by Mani Rao
Praise
Ravi Shankar is now, truly, one of America’s finest younger poets.
--Dick Allen, Connecticut poet laureate
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
Ravi Shankar’s poems are the verbal artifacts of a singular, many-sided and distinguished consciousness.
--Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer Prize winner
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 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
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
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
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
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.
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
--Dick Allen, Connecticut poet laureate
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
Ravi Shankar’s poems are the verbal artifacts of a singular, many-sided and distinguished consciousness.
--Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer Prize winner
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 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
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
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
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
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.
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