Asian/Other

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.

“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