BOOKS

Shreela Ray: On The Life and Work of an American Master

Unsung Masters Series, 2021
$16.00
ISBN: 978-1734435610

Purchase from: Small Press Distribution / IndieBound / Bookshop

From the publisher: This volume in the Unsung Masters Series examines the poetry, life, and legacy of Shreela Ray, an Indian American poet of extraordinary ability. The Unsung Masters Series exists to bring the work of great, undervalued authors to new generations of reader.

About Shreela Ray

“Shreela was the first poet of color I ever met, the only poet of color I would ever study with … and the first “real” poet I personally knew who saw little difference between the political and the personal in her work… It was a poetry of historical consequences (or “exile,” as some critics put it), a collision of different (and sometimes harmful) mythologies, but the voice that wielded them was sure, the craft was elegant, and the stage the poems usually played themselves out on was small, personal, unexpected, human.” — CORNELIUS EADY

“Ray’s work—written in pared down language, somewhat stark, sometimes tart, always sharp— was noted for its urbane and cosmopolitan phrasing, dark wit and the multiple lineages from which it drew. Her lineages include such Indian Anglophone poets as Kamala Das and Eunice De Souza but also the global Anglophone approach to the lyric of Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, or Fleur Adcock. At the same time Ray’s poetry felt fully “American,” combining a conversational, funny, loving tone with brash bravado, a committed “present tense”-ness reminiscent in many ways of second generation New York School, and deep philosophical inquiry especially in the later lyrics.” — KAZIM ALI, from the introduction