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Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar is author/editor of a dozen books, including most recently “The Golden Shovel: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks” and “Autobiography of a Goddess”, translations of the 9th century Tamil poet/saint, Andal which won the 2016/2017 Muse India Translation Award. He founded the online journal of arts Drunken Boat, has won a Pushcart Prize and a RISCA artist grant, has appeared on Radio NPR, the BBC and PBS, in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Caravan, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and been interviewed and translated into over 10 languages. He currently holds a research fellowship from the University of Sydney.

  • Durable Transit

    About the Book

    Ravi Shankar’s poems are immortal in the flesh, finding in The life of the mind its interpretations, its instrumentality. The surpassing, transient, lyrical moment; and in the life of the World’s body the permanent, unflinching presence of thought, Unconfined by time and space. They are the verbal artifacts of a Singular, many-sided, and distinguished consciousness.Pulitzer Prize winner Vijay Seshadri Engorged with image, thick, viscous and churning, Ravi Shankar’s Poems have the density of mercury as well as its fluidity and Mobility…The energy is visceral. The language is restless, hungry For surprise, the register swinging between the formal and the Demotic (both American and Indian). Underlying this is an Almost voluptuous need to embrace myth, history, metaphysics And pop culture, and bring all of it into a single book, and Sometimes a single poem. This is matched by an alertness to form with references ranging from the Bop to the pada — making for A playful, stylistically supple poetry. – Arundhathi Subramaniam Ravi Shankar’s poems have a fine-tuned sense of form, a rare Delight in language. Through wit and abstraction, they reveal a Metaphysics of longing, binding us to the elements of our moving World. – Meena Alexander

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

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