Instrumentality, Poems by Ravi Shankar

Instrumentality, Ravi Shankar's first collection of poems, is an urbane, ironic look at human experience and human perception of that experience. Blending a Stevensesque quality for a meditation with an Ashberyesque sense of humor, Instrumentality establishes Shankar as a poet of deep intelligence and deep devotion to the things of this world.

Sample Poems by Ravi Shankar

Review of Instrumentality in New Pages

"Quirky, quizzical, inquisitive, Ravi Shankar in Instrumentality goes in quest of what the oddness of language and imagination can reveal: “a hush of atoms holding a planet together.” By turns, lyrical and meditative, these poems are guided by a strong intelligence toward resolutions that are both surprising and apt."—Gregory Orr

"A New Confessions of Zeno, this time in verse. Topics most of us brood over in private are here brought out into daylight by an analyst clad in bullet-proof unembarrassment. 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

Ravi Shankar was born in Washington DC, grew up in Manassas, known for the Battles of Bull Run and Lorena Bobbitt, attended third grade in South India, went to a Science and Tech high school, worked a variety of jobs, including as knife salesman and drywall hanger, eventually matriculating from the University of Virginia and Columbia University. He is currently poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University and a founding editor of the internationally acclaimed online journal of the arts, . His poems have won many awards, including the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, the Bennett Prize for Poetry at Columbia University, and honorable mention in the Indiana Review Poetry Prize. His critical work has previously appeared in such places as Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, The Iowa Review, The AWP Writer's Chronicle, among other publications. He has read at such venues as The National Arts Club, Columbia University, KGB, The Ear Inn, Sherry French Gallery, and Cornelia Street Cafe, and served on panels at UCLA, Poet's House, South-by-Southwest Interactive/Film Festival, and the AWP Conference in Baltimore. He reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and is currently editing an anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry.

ISBN 1932339221, 96 pages, $16.00

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