Overview

A perceptive, discursive exploration of poetry, race, and otherness from one of our most promising new voices in criticism. Vidyan Ravinthiran, a Sri Lankan Tamil English poet and second-generation immigrant, explores the feeling of being an outsider both on the page and in life. Discussing the civil rights history of South Asians within the UK as well as their placelessness in the US, Ravinthiran leaps adventurously between memoir and criticism, offering astute close readings of poets such as Tennyson, the Tamil poet Cheran, Solmaz Sharif, and Sharon Olds. He writes about Sri Lanka; intergenerational trauma; pandemic parenting in an autism family; relationships shaped by the internet; growing up with a speech impediment and being sent by one's aspirational brown parents to speech lessons; and the relative invisibility of South Asians in Western television and film. This electric, compelling hybrid memoir examines the wider relationships among culture, race, and the self. AUTHOR: Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, England, to Sri Lankan Tamils. He now teaches at Harvard University. He has written two collections of poetry and a work of literary criticism about Elizabeth Bishop. He lives in Acton, Massachusetts.

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9781785788628

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Reviews

"How often are we rendered strange and unmappable to ourselves by the very cultures that seek to classify and contain us? And yet, as Vidyan Ravinthiran writes, ""how hard it seems, for many of us, to even begin to escape the face in the mirror!"" With fearless honesty and a stunning lyric imagination, Asian/Other disrupts the silence and dispels the darkness into which so much vital testimony has been huddled. This is a bold, borderless, breathtaking memoir about race, language, inheritance, and love's many forms and outposts. * Tracy K. Smith, poet *"

How often are we rendered strange and unmappable to ourselves by the very cultures that seek to classify and contain us? And yet, as Vidyan Ravinthiran writes, ""how hard it seems, for many of us, to even begin to escape the face in the mirror!"" With fearless honesty and a stunning lyric imagination, Asian/Other disrupts the silence and dispels the darkness into which so much vital testimony has been huddled. This is a bold, borderless, breathtaking memoir about race, language, inheritance, and love's many forms and outposts. * Tracy K. Smith, poet * Written in soaring, exhilarating prose, with the sentences impatient to pack in more ? more ideas, more thought, more life ? this book will come to be seen as a turning point in writing about literature, race, identity, and otherness. * Neel Mukherjee, author of Choice * There's nothing like Asian/Other ... I received an education I didn't know I needed until I had found it. Read it. * Stephanie Burt, author of We Are Mermaids *

Author Information

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, England, to Sri Lankan Tamils. He now teaches at Harvard University. He writes both poetry and literary criticism.

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