Vidyan Ravinthiran

These poems emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries. Sensuous, droll, yearning, they consider otherwise forgotten (ignored, repressed, erased) events. In 2017, Vidyan Ravinthiran travelled to the north of Sri Lanka where his parents grew up – it finally felt safe – visiting war-torn Tamil areas overwritten by a tourist focus on the sun-spoiled South. In 2020, he, his wife and their one-year-old moved from Britain to the United States, months before the pandemic hit and the travel ban separated them for almost two years from family overseas. Avidya is a political and a spiritual collection, whose multiple poetic forms, open and closed, are shaped by myth and philosophy, and by Sri Lankan as well as global crises. It is also a book about the forms of both strength and fear that parents pass on to their children.

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.