The critic, poet, and scholar Vidyan Ravinthiran searches for alternatives to the standard models of writing about poetry, pursuing close, imaginative readings of a variety of authors. Discussing neglected writers and those well- known in the West, these essays are unabashedly passionate and subjective yet keenly analytical and investigative.
Ravinthiran's second collection is a book of sonnets for his wife. These are love poems that turn analytical, consider the world, and stand for a larger community, including readers themselves. Many describe life in the North East for a mixed-race couple, considering both the redemptive force of love and the cultural origins of our discontent.
This book approaches, for the first time, Elizabeth Bishop's work in multiple genres (her prose-like verse, her literary prose, her prose poems, and her letter prose) as a stylistic whole.