HOME /

Publications

Criticism

  • Poetry and Opinion (forthcoming from Cambridge UP).
  • Asian/Other (forthcoming from Norton in the US and Icon in the UK, 2025).
  • Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (New York: OUP, 2023).
  • Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics (New York: Columbia UP, 2022)
  • Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015 / paperback release, July 2017).

 

Edited

  • Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English poetry from Sri Lanka and its diaspora, edited with Shash Trevett and Seni Seneviratne (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2023 and Penguin Random House India, 2024).
  • Selected Poetry and Prose of Srinivas Rayaprol, edited with Graziano Krätli (Carcanet, 2020).
  • Selected Poetry of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, edited (NYRB Books, 2020).

 

Verse

  • Avidya (forthcoming from Bloodaxe, 2025).
  • The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2019).
  • Grun-tu-molani (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2014)

Individual poems have been published in a number of anthologies, as well as periodicals such as The Nation, the TLS, The Financial Times, the Guardian, Poetry, The Yale Review, and all the major UK poetry magazines.

 

Selected essays in journals

 

Selected essays in magazines

  • ‘Against Citation’, forthcoming in Literary Activism.
  • ‘Toward a Poetics of Video Games’, forthcoming in The Sydney Review of Books.
  • Review-essay of Lakdas Wikkramasinha’s Selected Poems (NYRB), forthcoming in The Boston Review.
  • ‘What will I do in the future?’, review of Hannah Sullivan, Solmaz Sharif and Will Harris, The Poetry Review (Summer 2023).
  • 'T.S. Eliot, Edgelord', Poetry London 102 (Summer 2022): published online.
  • ‘Interloper’ (on lockdown, Philip Larkin, Sharon Olds, Ian Hamilton, and reading as a person of colour), Cambridge Literary Review 13 (Easter 2021): 92-104.
  • ‘Victim and Accused’ (on Sri Lanka, and empathy), Granta 154: 133-55.
  • ‘A flint holds fire’ (on poetry and speech impediments), Poetry London 97 (Autumn 2020): 25-7.
  • ‘Dreaming the World: Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Extraordinary Sentences’, The Georgia Review, Vol. LXXXIV, No. 3 (Fall 2020): 753-767.
  • ‘Speech Acts: Eunice de Souza’, The Yale Review, Vol. 108, No. 2 (Summer 2020): 202-16.
  • ‘Myriad Minded’ (Vahni Capildeo), Poetry, Vol. 216, No. 2 (May 2020): 169-82.
  •  ‘A Slave and Worshiper at Love’s Doorstep: Mir Taqi Mir’, Modern Poetry in Translation (2019) 3: 103-113.
  •  ‘At Home or Nowhere: A.K. Ramanujan’, The Poetry Review, Vol 109, No. 2 (Summer 2019): 79-91.
  • ‘There Must Be Something To Say’ (on verse-sound), Poetry, Vol. 214, No. 3 (June 2019): 267-75.
  •  ‘Collapsing Literature into Politics: Adrienne Rich’, The Dark Horse 40 (Winter-Spring 2019): 90-99.
  • ‘Trying to Become Winged’ (Galway Kinnell), Poetry, Vol. 213, No. 1 (October 2018): 71-82.
  • ‘What is good?’ (Czeslaw Milosz), The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 47, Issue 2, (June 2018): 168–200.
  • ‘The things of earth are not objects’ (A.R. Ammons), PN Review 241, Vol. 44, No. 5 (May-June 2018): 31-4.
  •  ‘Shadows Hard As Board’ (Thom Gunn), Poetry, Vol. 211, No. 6 (March 2018): 597-608.
  • ‘“An undependable but sometimes marvelous thing”: Elizabeth Bishop, communication, and other people’, PN Review 238, Vol. 44, No. 2 (November-December 2017): 26-30.
  • ‘”Dream” makes a giddy sound: 100 years of Gwendolyn Brooks’, The Poetry Review 107:2 (Summer 2017): 82-90.
  • ‘The Lonely Dream’ (Rae Armantrout), Poetry, Vol. 209, No. 5 (February 2017): 475-87.
  •  ‘Your Thorns Are the Best Part of You’ (Marianne Moore, Stevie Smith), Poetry, Vol. 209, No. 1 (October 2016): 83-103.
  • ‘Knowing and Unknowing’ (the Sri Lankan civil war), The Caravan (January 2016): 92-8.
  • ‘All the Animals in My Poems Go into the Ark’ (Silkin, Langley, Sisson), Poetry, Vol. 207, No. 4 (January 2016): 409-25.
  • ‘You Can’t Close Your Eyes For A Sec’ (A.K. Mehrotra), The Caravan (March 2015): 69-74.
  • ‘Stair Steps’ (Ana Blandiana), Edinburgh Review 140: 117-27.
  • ‘Poet and Critic’ (Ted Hughes), PN Review 210, Vol. 39, No. 4 (March-April 2013): 42-6.

 

Essays in books

  • ‘Gunn’s endings’, in Thom Gunn: A Prismatic Portrait, ed. Stefania Michelucci (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming).
  • ‘Journal prose’, in Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context, ed. Martin Dubois (CUP, forthcoming).
  • ‘Graham’s forms’, in Reading W.S. Graham, ed. Edward Allen (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming).
  • ‘Prose’, in Elizabeth Bishop in Context, ed. Jonathan Ellis and Angus Cleghorn (Cambridge: CUP, 2021): 95-104.
  • ‘Nabokov and the Privilege of Style’, in Modernism and Close Reading, ed. David James (Oxford: OUP, 2020): 152-72.
  • ‘ “Manuelzinho”, Brazil and identity politics’, in Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019): 33-47.
  • ‘The nature of Englishness: the hybrid poetics of Ted Hughes’, in Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture, ed. Neil Roberts, Mark Wormald and Terry Gifford (Cham: Palgrave, 2018): 107-23.
  • ‘T.S. Eliot’s Prose (Poetry)’, in British Prose Poetry: The Poems Without Lines, ed. Jane Monson (Cham: Palgrave, 2018): 133-47.
  • ‘Kolatkar’s Spontaneity’, in Poetry and Voice: A Book of Essays, ed. Stephanie Norgate and Ellie Piddington (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012): 89-103.

 

I've also written over forty shorter pieces of journalism for newspapers and magazines that include the TLS and The Telegraph.