Source: From the University Website: Ravi Shankar, poet-in-residence and assistant professor of English, is the author of Instrumentality, a collection of his poems, published by Cherry Grove Collections in Cincinnati, Ohio. Noted poet and professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia Gregory Orr calls the work: “Quirky, quizzical, inquisitive . . . [and] in quest of what the oddness of language and imagination can reveal . . . By turns, lyrical and meditative, these poems are guided by a strong intelligence toward resolutions that are both surprising and apt.
Alfred Corn, recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and NEA and author of nine books of poems, writes about Shankar’s book: “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.” Shankar is a founding editor of the online journal of the arts “Drunken Boat” (http://www.drunkenboat.com). Among many awards won by Shankar’s poems are the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize and the Bennett Prize for Poetry at Columbia University. His critical work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, The Iowa Review, and The AWP Writer’s Chronicle. He reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and is currently editing an anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry.