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.

Vidyan Ravinthiran is associate professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (2015) as well as two books of poetry, Grun-tu-molani (2014) and The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (2019).

Maureen N. McLane, author of My Poets:
What would an actually contemporary literary criticism sound like? This magisterial yet companionable book heralds the arrival of a major critical voice and prose stylist, a virtuoso modelling for us “styles of attention.” Ravinthiran brings to poetries in English his erudition, formal acuities, a passionately deprovincializing sensibility, political and ethical attunement, and stylistic panache. From Mir Taqi Mir to Thomas Hardy to Elizabeth Bishop to Srinivas Rayaprol, Ravinthiran surveys the territory and remakes it (to use imperial metaphors he would abjure). Impassioned, elegant, sometimes barbed, this is restless, startlingly illuminating criticism. In Ravinthiran, a poet as well as critic, the world-making and world-registering powers of poetry find a brilliant, vivifying advocate.