SHANKAR NARAYAN

Writer | changemaker | teacher | Friend

These poems are wholly original and loaded with compassion, intellect, and lyric interrogation. Shankar Narayan’s Postcards from the New World explores proximity, intimacy, identity, violence, and diaspora with a knowing, prophetic allure. I love these poems for their epistemological underpinnings and their graceful invention. Gorgeous surprises fuel this wonderful debut. Fiercely talented and equally humane, Narayan is one of my favorite new poets.

—Lee Herrick, Poet Laureate of California

This poem undid me … broke me open with its enacted reticence, its aching self-erasure, its pleas to be visible outside a community of support, and its ending which complicates the boundaries between skin and "borders." … Read it alone in a room. Let its echoes undo your safety.

—Alina Stefanescu, Judge, 2020 River Heron Poetry Prize