text: b.1967 is an internationally well-known Marathi poet, editor, publisher and translator. His published works include Chautishiparyantchya Kavita Poems Till Thirty-Four, Thambtach Yet Nahi Just Cant Stop and Ya Roommadhye Aale Ki Life Suru Hote The Moment You Enter This Room, Life Begins. His poems have been translated into English, French, Spanish, German, Urdu, Arabic, Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. The celebrated poet and translator Dilip Chitre translated Chautishiparyantchya Kavita into English and titled the book Virus Alert which then has been translated into Spanish-Alarma De Virus by Zingonia Zingone and in Irish as Folireamh Vris by Gabriel Rosenstock.
  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 and space. They are the verbal artifacts of a Singular, many-sided, and distinguished consciousness.Pulitzer Prize winner Vijay Seshadri Engorged with image, thick, viscous and churning, Ravi Shankar’s Poems have the density of mercury as well as its fluidity and Mobility…The energy is visceral. The language is restless, hungry For surprise, the register swinging between the formal and the Demotic (both American and Indian). Underlying this is an Almost voluptuous need to embrace myth, history, metaphysics And pop culture, and bring all of it into a single book, and Sometimes a single poem. This is matched by an alertness to form with references ranging from the Bop to the pada — making for A playful, stylistically supple poetry. – Arundhathi Subramaniam 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 is truly, now, one of America’s finest younger poets.-Dick Allen
  Through sex-dolls and addictions, for whom poetry can be just another narcotic throbbing in your vein. Khandekar’s man has stretched himself to the limits of the Machiavellian primate, modifying his behaviour and absurdum to fit in with the changing patterns of a world spinning out of control on the wheel of progress. Meet the ghost in the machine Sanjeev Khandekar’s poetry grins impishly, then socks you in the eye. It makes you feel horns on your head and inspect your skin for green stripes. Khandekar breaks conventions of belief, language and genre to offer a world with no certainties, where you are just a gob of self-awareness floating in a matrix of virtual reality, mutating every moment to balance your inner needs with social expectations. You are the Mutatis Mutandis Man the human ‘with necessary changes’ carried out the modified man tossed between inscrutable science and enigmatic religious faith, the creature who gropes for love and creativity that may lure you towards self-destruction. Meet Khandekar’s Monster and see if he seems familiar.
  Khandekar’s poetry, like his art, is disturbingly unconventional; and Abhay Sardesai and Nandita Wagle’s excellent translation from Marathi now brings it to the English reader.
  -Antara Dev Sen
  Adman, householder, mystic, public intellectual and ashram devotee, Kersy Katrak (1936-2007) has never quite received his due as a poet. Katrak’s ‘lush, provocative, and very readable’verse has, with its rare but persistent appearance in anthologies of Indian poetry in English, remained in a curious way at once unforgotten and unrecognized. This book aims, at long last,to remedy this state of affairs. It is the very first comprehensive collection of Katrak’s poetic work, most of it long out of print,some of it previously published only in hard-to-find periodicals. Katrak’s poetry resonates powerfully with Wallace Steven’s observation that ‘It is equal to living in a tragic land, To live in a tragic time’. His concerns remain,palpably,our concerns: a search for the everyday alchemy that might translate the visceral potentials of collective life into generative forms of belonging. This problem of the relation between inner energies and outer forms is at the core of Katrak’s work as a poet and a mystic. And it is what binds his esoteric commitments to his career in advertising. The anthropologist William Mazzarella’s critical introduction to the present volume is the first substantive exploration of these connections in Katrak’s life and work.
  Flesh Tint Like a painting by Velazquez A woman stands Alone in the frame Touched by the brush of light Blossoming. How did Flesh Tint reflect Naples Yellow In this greenish blue room? What made the sun Suddenly rise on the palette?