Tallying the Hemispheres

Description

“We are in a kind of orbit around the people, places, and ideas that we once held so close and have since let go of, and that at any given moment we are approaching perihelion or aphelion with respect to these past selves.” –from “In Praise of Abstraction”

Called one of “America’s finest younger poets” by former Connecticut poet laureate Dick Allen and “a diaspora icon” by The Hindu, Pushcart-prize winning poet and acclaimed memoirist Ravi Shankar has been simultaneously crafting a canny and prophetic body of essays. Split into four sections – Self and Subcontinent, Pomegranates, Toxic Debt, Empty Chairs, The American Experiment, and On Finding Futurity – Tallying the Hemispheres finds Shankar casting a roving, deeply curious eye across disparate fields, from world literature and digital humanities to the Avant-garde to the ancient Vedic. Reading deeply and comparatively, revealing himself to be a passionate, erudite essayist, he is equally at home pursuing the Armenian poetic form of the hayren in Yerevan as he is jousting with Rumi, Wallace Stevens, Anne Waldman, William Carlos Williams, Biggie Smalls, Liu Xia, or Agha Shahid Ali. Published in such venues as The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets, The American Book Review, The AWP Writer’s Chronicle, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, The Poetry Society of America, The Quarterly Conversation and anthologies by Cambridge University Press, The University of Iowa Press and others, these essays are deft, eclectic, sympathetic, wry, engaging, and insightful. Throughout this collection, Shankar encourages us to look with greater thoughtfulness and sensitivity at the world around us, marveling at and revealing in it a remarkable breadth of knowledge.

Ravi Shankar is a postmodern flaneur. 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

Quirky, quizzical, inquisitive, by turns lyrical and meditative, Ravi

Shankar is guided by a strong intelligence toward resolutions that are both surprising and apt.
—Gregory Orr, Rockefeller Fellow

Pushcart-prize winning poet, author, editor, translator, and professor, Ravi Shankar Ph.D. is the author and editor of over fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, including most recently, the memoir Correctional called “the work of an absolutely brilliant writer” by advance reviewer and shortlisted for the 2022 CT Lit Prize; the Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems: 1998-2018 (Recent Works Press); W.W. Norton & Co.’s Language for a New Century called a “beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer; the Muse India Award winning translations of 8th century Tamil poet/saint, Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess (Zubaan/University of Chicago Press); an anthology celebrating a new poetic form and honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, The Golden Shovel (University of Arkansas Press); a collaboration with T.S. Eliot Prize winner George Szirtes, A Field Guide to Southern China (Eyewear Books); the National Poetry Review Prize winning Deepening Groove; the Carolina Wren judges award winning What Else Could it Be; a collaboration with late American artist Sol LeWitt Seamless Matter (Rain Taxi Ohm Editions); and the finalist for the Connecticut Book Awards Instrumentality, poems from which have appeared around the world. Translated into over 12 languages and recipient of a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner as well as winner of the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize,

Shankar has taught at such institutions as Columbia University, Fairfield University, the City University of Hong Kong and the University of Sydney.

Shankar has held fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Jentel Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Blue Mountain Center and many others. Recipient of numerous grants and awards, including multiple “Excellence-in-Teaching Awards,” his students have gone on to publish dozens of books of their own. Granted fellowships by the New York State Council on the Arts and the Rhode Island State Commission on the Arts, Shankar has been featured in The New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, BBC, NPR and the PBS Newshour. His essays have appeared in such places as the Georgia Review, the Hartford Courant, and for the Poetry Society of America. He has been featured at the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry International and he founded one of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts, Drunken Boat, winner of a South-by-Southwest Web Award and featured on BBC-Vietnam. He currently teaches creative writing at Tufts University and for the New York Writers Workshop and is outgoing Chairman of the Asia Pacific Writers Workshop.

Shankar currently teaches creative writing at Tufts University and his memoir Correctional was published in 2022.