BIO
California-based writer Amarnath Ravva has performed at LACMA, Machine Project, the MAK Center at the Schindler House, New Langton Arts, the Hammer Museum, USC, Pomona, CalArts, and the Sorbonne. In addition to his writing practice, he is a member of the site specific ambient music supergroup Ambient Force 3000 and for the past eight years he has helped run and curate events at Betalevel, a venue for social experimentation and hands-on culture located in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.
AMERICAN CANYON
KAYA PRESS, FALL 2013
Blending myth with interviews and first-person narrative, American Canyon uses prose, documentary footage, and still photos to recount the fragmented and ever evolving story of one person’s apprehension of the ghosts of history. This narrative of a son’s love for his mother and the ritual he performs for her takes us from California to Rameswaram, the southern tip of the Indian peninsula. It is a meditation on the moments in history that placed him in front of a small bright fire, a lament for the continual loss of those who, by remembering, let us know who we are.
“A mesmerizing and elegiac meditation on identity, nationality, and desire. Ravva coils narratives of India and the American West in on each other, telling a family history that is both fragmented and tender. A phenomenal debut.”
-Colin Dickey
“A complex reworking of memoir form, using the tools of poetry remelted, as in Vulcan’s forge, to slash away at the ghosts and ghouls of conventional prose usage. The new journalism, Ravva-style, stimulates the nerve endings with its alternately lush and spare renditions of some spectacular settings, William Kentridge or Gauguin or Florine Stettheimer should be in charge of the art direction when the movie, or opera, appears, but in the meantime sit back and enjoy the calm cool stylings of one of America’s finest young writers.”
-Kevin Killian
“In this book words that are usually strangers to each other are invited into the same paragraph. They look at each other carefully and the cluster of English words seated politely and obediently around the Telugu makes room for them. Now a bit of chatter begins. The words like the way the atmosphere is charged by a free exchange of vocabulary. This is what is meant to happen in our world at its best.”
-Fanny Howe
“American Canyon is a book like none I have encountered, an almost hallucinatory immediacy offered with rare generosity. Amar Ravva’s tapestry of East and West demonstrates the importance of remembering rituals and histories—those of both personal and social scale.”
-Nancy Buchanan
LINKS
Videopoetics, Betalevel, da benshi code
WORK ONLINE
Drunken Boat, Issue #10, Requited, [out of nothing], LA-lit
IN PRINT
Indivisible: an Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry, Encyclopedia Project, vol 2
CONTACT
amar at videopoetics.org
CREDITS
All videos & timelapses were shot by Amarnath Ravva in California, Sikkim, & Kerala. Website design and development by Amarnath Ravva.
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- : Quick 1 night trip to the Bay Area- feeling quite zippy!