Prakriti Foundation is delighted to invite you to

A Poetry Reading by Ravi Shankar and the Chennai launch of the Norton anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East, and Beyond.

Venue: Madras Terrace House, 15, Sripuram 2nd Street, Royapettah, Chennai

Ravi Shankar will read from his own books of poems and also from a major new anthology of contemporary poetry from Asia and the Middle East, of which he is one of the three editors. A short discussion will follow the reading, which will be introduced and moderated by contemporary poet Vivek Narayanan.

Both as a poet and as an editor, Ravi Shankar is among the most exciting and highly regarded of young American writers. Among other things, he has long been known as the founder-editor of Drunken Boat (www.drunkenboat.com), a remarkable and pioneering literary journal on the web featuring a "big selection of poetry, web art, prose, and sound ranging from the quirky to the somber".

Praise for *Language for a New Century*:

"This anthology gives entry to its vast expression in the Middle East and Asia, including the changing sensibilities of poets in the ever-growing world of immigration. Assembled here is not the Tower of Babel, but the astonishment and subtlety inherent in many languages and their experimental modes to expand the power of words. The introductions to each section offer perceptions engagingly, against which to place one's own readings. The editors have boldly envisaged and compiled a beautiful achievement for world literature."
- Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer

Praise for Ravi Shankar's own book of poems, *Instrumentality*:

"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

"Ravi Shankar's poems are immortal in the flesh, finding in the life of the mind--its interpretations, its "instrumentality"--the surpassing, transient lyrical moment; and in the life of the world's body the permanent, unflinching presence of thought, unconfined by time or space. They are the verbal artifacts of a singular, many-sided, and distinguished consciousness."
- Vijay Seshadri