Betweenness [Paperback]

Varun Ravindran's full-length debut,Betweenness,is poetic polyphony and counterpoint. Formally inventive, at times layering multiple voices, and at other points, implementing sheet music as poetic form,Ravindran explores spirituality; his experience as an immigrant existing in the peripheries of both Indian and American culture, but part of neither; and of history, as he speaks on his late father and grandafther, both of whom struggled with alcoholism until their deaths. Accumulating into chords and intervals, these poems unite in a song of self that contains multitudes of voice and of form. Piece-by-piece they are hyaline and complex, while the affect of the whole crescendoes into an authentic and important new voice in American poetry. US

The Zodiac of Midges

Palace of waters,

of green dark silence,

the dark green profound 

sired of water

rubbing water

place of water

stone, mountains,

place of firs, sheer

green as dusk, place

of dusk. Place of dusk

like rain. Place of rain.

Place of rain

like consciousness

abyss, plenum

sea-palace

place of seas

valleys shine-creased, 

lupin-creased

porousness

a pouring,

a pouringplace

into which sound — 

andme — 

into all of it — 

teeth strung along neat rains

tossed in the breast-

soft dark all night — 

the sounds of water — 

wet and bit the black rocks

Mt. Hood

Hood River

Grace Su’s China Gorge

“41 years in the same place”

stranded humpbacks

the water, the soil, the soil,

soil beneath, benl3¢