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.