Betweenness
Poems by Varun Ravindran
Varun Ravindran’s Betweenness is polyphony and counterpoint. Formally inventive, at times layering multiple voices, and at other points, implementing sheet music as poetic form, Ravindran explores spirituality; his experience as an immigrant existing in the peripheries of both Indian and American culture, but part of neither; and of history, as he speaks on his late father and grandfather, both of whom struggled with alcoholism until their deaths. Accumulating into chords and intervals, these poems unite in a song of self that contains multitudes of voice and of form. Piece-by-piece they are hyaline and complex, while the effect of the whole crescendos into an authentic and important new voice in American poetry.
An excerpt from Betweenness
Schubert’s Moments Musicaux No. 2
“Light takes the tree . . .”
–Roethke
but at Mud Run and its deep beeches and its cardinals plump
as embroidery and its RV’s and its darners and its condoms
like comets in the shrubs it’s the tree which not takes take
hinting purpose, the tree which floats into the long O long
slow tree sleepwalks into the low light
near Pittsburgh grand in his birchy bones my appa dandling
his bottles singing Tamil songs older than he so here in Mud
Run I want to build a hovel. Armfuls of plums and honey and
a pile of books for sustenance. Lying on my back my head out
of doors asterism whip-poor-will the open palm of space cupping
earth the nightjar. I hum Schubert I skin a plum far in the alone
I learn the name of each star Algenib Markab Enif Scheat all far
all too far too far to change the spit the spit bright plums the pit
near Mud Run where I cherish this sparrow-footprint gashing
Mud Run’s water. Minnow or miracle? The brook the light
the light in the river the dusk. Widening. In the dusk Mud Run
running nowhere deepening.
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.
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.
Ravindran’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.
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.
In 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.
Book Details
Title: Betweenness
Author: Varun Ravindran
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Trade Paperback
6 x 9
96 pages
ISBN: 9781936097609
$16.95
Dist. by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com, 800-788-2123
Available at your favorite local bookstore, on bookshop.org, and wherever books are sold.
