ASIAN/OTHER

A perceptive exploration of poetry race and otherness from one of our most promising voices in criticism Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in the north of England to Sri Lankan Tamils and moved to the United States five years ago Considering identity in both its political and psychological senses as these concepts fuse or fail to at different times and in different places he leaps adventurously between memoir and criticism understanding his life through poetry and vice versa Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor he writes both about and through poems discussing Sri Lanka experiences of racism and resilience 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 elocution lessons and the relative invisibility of South Asians in Western television and film This electric compelling hybrid memoir discovers a new way of writing about the self and also literature