Ravi Shankar's Voluptuous Bristle

Dear friends – just wanted to announce my forthcoming chapbook, Voluptuous Bristle, ready for pre-order at Finishing Line Press. It’s my first book in nearly four years and a peek into my upcoming manuscript of poems. Perhaps what I’m most pleased by though is the chance to use old friend Sonya Sklaroff’s painting on the cover. If you don’t mind wading, you’ll find it at Finishing Line Press.



You know you need to read a poem about a painting that begins “Giddy up pigment!” Ravi Shankar is a postmodern flâneur. He wanders the world’s real and fictional gridded cities (or perhaps his astral body swoops high above them) and reports back. Using x-ray vision, a snappy vocabulary and considerable intelligence he hones in on what’s flaunted and hidden, the understated and the gaudy, the modest and the excessive. Each poem is a tiny stage on which miniature dramas ignite, in all their cunning, vivid, mutating detail. Visual art, music, and politics; the sensual and the ornate all percolate here. Voluptuous Bristle gives voice to a mind readers will be happy to spend time inside.
-Amy Gerstler

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Also, check out the new issue of Drunken Boat, with an interview with US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan and a Sound Art Folio, among other goodness.

Drunken Boat

Ravi, Co-MC, Hartford Club, Jan. 2010

Ravi, Driving While Brown, @ NYPD Hostel