[Yale-readings] Reminder: Readings @ Artspace, Friday, June 11th, 7:30pm

[Nancy Kuhl]

>Soundworks Book Party
>     Friday, June 11th, 7:30 pm
>         Artspace in New Haven, 50 Orange Street at Crown, New Haven, 06510
>         Phone: 203-772-2709, email: info at artspacenh.org
>         Tina Chang
>
>         Ravi Shankar
>
>         Prageeta Sharma
>
>
>         Celebrate
>
>         Half-Lit Houses
>
>         <http://www.fourwaybooks.com/books/chang/index.html>
>
>Tina Chang's poems perform the ancient tasks of remembrance, recovery, and 
>praise. This work seeks to account for a life in the context of the myths, 
>cultural and familial, that both nurture and threaten that very life and 
>the voice that might sing it into legend. This is a poetry of amazing 
>lushness, melancholy and affirmation.
>                 —Li-Young Lee
>
>Her mouth is fertile, seeded with incidents from a family history that lay 
>scattered about like grains of rice upon which our poet kneels. Misfit and 
>starlet, she wrestles with her father on earth and in Heaven. Whether 
>seasoned with gunpowder or with sugar, Tina Chang's legacy is neither 
>entirely Chinese nor American but an inheritance to be spoken through 
>dialects—a composite language forged out of her many lyrical selves.
>                 —Timothy Liu
>
>         Instrumentality
>         <http://www.cherry-grove.com/shankar.html>
>
>Instrumentality plays expectations and delivers uncanny reformulations 
>that seem "predestined, in retrospect." Ravi Shankar’s poems are filled 
>with the pleasure of subjects dissolving into ideas, ideas folding into 
>sounds, and sounds echoing familiar but elusive translocations.
>—Charles Bernstein
>
>This is a very special first book. Ravi Shankar's poems have a fine tuned 
>sense of form, a rare delight in language. Through wit and abstraction 
>they reveal a metaphysics of longing, binding us to the elements of our 
>moving world.
>                 —Meena Alexander
>
>Quirky, quizzical, inquisitive, Ravi Shankar in Instrumentality goes in 
>quest of what the oddness of language and imagination can reveal: “a hush 
>of atoms holding a planet together.” By turns, lyrical and meditative, 
>these poems are guided by a strong intelligence toward resolutions that 
>are both surprising and apt.
>                 —Gregory Orr
>
>         The Opening Question
>         <http://www.fencebooks.com/new_titles.html>
>
>Sharma is inclined to explore cultural disjunctions, the glide of sound, 
>power, and perception between people and languages: "you are pointing west 
>when you say dish, desh." Sometimes she sounds as American as John 
>Berryman. But at other times Sharma serializes simple declarative 
>statements or taps into a kind of Berlitz translation diction: "We are an 
>Indian family with Indian friends from India." In other words, her 
>imagination is whirring at full tilt, and her approaches to the poem are 
>varied and fresh and exciting.
>                 —Forrest Gander, Boston Review
>
>
>***************
>Ravi Shankar
>Poet-in-Residence
>Assistant Professor
>CCSU - English Dept.
>860-832-2766
>shankarr at ccsu.edu

Nancy Kuhl
Assistant Curator, The Yale Collection of American Literature
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University
121 Wall Street
P.O. Box 208240
New Haven, CT 06520-8240
Phone: 203.432.2966
Fax: 203.432.4047