Reviews
Seamless Matter by Ravi Shankar
Gina Marie LoBianco
Seamless Matter: Thirty Stills.
Ravi Shankar.
OHM Editions, 2010.
30 pages, $7.50 (paperback).
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As précis as a plum, each thumbnail-sized poem is as a microscope slide delivering an inner reality in twelve lines. These stills sacrifice verbosity for quality, richness, and flavor, and are ripened by the last line. From "Mosquito," the "infuriating speck," to "Bats" which "turn to ellipses," these thirty stills are poems that could fit easily into a breath.
Each poem fulfills the appetite that first opened the book; each word appears handpicked and naturally collapses on the page where it pauses in sequence like "a darting blue shard the length of a toothpick" which begins, lifelike, at the "Crossings" and ends blatantly with a "Hospital," "Blood," and "Buzzards."