Varun Ravindran’s Betweenness is a tidal book — its language shimmering, sedimented, and raw. These poems swell and recede across generations and geographies: from Madras to the Oregon coast, from the echo of a grandfather’s voice to the hush of a lover’s breath. Each page is scored with longing and laced with salt. What remains between the lines is not absence, but a music of return. This is a debut that doesn’t just sing — it listens. — Samiya Bashir, I Hope This Helps Everything speaks in Betweenness, a startling and surprising debut collection. Among the rich voices and stories woven throughout this book, many secrets remain to be discovered — only if you accept Ravindran’s invitation to explore what happens when you create poems from musical chords and scores. To say that Ravindran is an innovator would be an understatement. We are lucky to witness such brilliance on the page. — Su Cho, The Symmetry of FishRavindran’s poems play, both in their formal and syntactical experimentation — demonstrating a vast range of visual presentations and conceptual frameworks — and in their tendency to playact, to don personas, to channel ghosts and perform characters, often speaking in many voices at the same time. These poems, which are also scripts, scores, compositions, ledgers, drafts, collages, emails, and pictures — works of “language prefigured by the basins it plays in” — invite the reader to participate in their making. They snake between the margins of genre and identity, skirting conventional dichotomies of “self” and “other,” of “here” and “there,” of parent and child, of origin and ending. They express a restless mind chasing not the truth, not beauty, not memory, but something in between. In Ravindran’s horizonless sea (“The sea, the sun-striated stridulating sea, the samsara sea”), I’m awash. — Jane Huffman, Public Abstract Full of seascapes and inscapes, Betweenness is an ecospiritual tour de force — a song of non-self, “bodiless and made of breaths” but also deeply, excruciatingly embodied. The poems read to me as Hopkinsian meditations on dependent origination, as if each syllable were a jewel in Indra’s net, in which each node echoes equally all the others, making a music of “things spooked to stillness amidst their irradicable ecstasy.” It is a virtuoso performance that must be read (out loud) to be believed. — Michael Jospeh Walsh, A SeasonIn Betweenness, Varun Ravindran maps a borderland, swimming in a sonic sea between language and music, between the deeply personal and the universal. Via hypnotic repetitions, overlapping voices and texts, and diverse vocabularies, Ravindran’s urgent poems accomplish the rare feat of moving through sound and music to confront — beautifully — deep questions of living, dying, and loving. These are counterpoints, variations, fugues, and arabesques in language, made with a composer’s sensitivity to sound itself. —Michael Zapruder, Composer/Songwriter, ed. Pink Thunder
