On Sharmila Voorakkara

I have been enthusiastic about Sharmila Voorakkara's poetry since the first poem she wrote for my poetry writing class several years ago. From the beginning, her perspectives were strange and compelling, not merely willfully odd, and her language and imagery were original, both wry and brilliantly awry. I was pleased to have my own impressions confirmed last spring by Charles Wright, who called me after seeing Sharmila's poetry thesis at the University of Virginia; he was exuberant about her work, saying that no one else in America was writing poems like hers.

—Elton Glaser, author of five full-length collections of poetry, most recently Pelican Tracks (2003). He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Akron, and edits the Akron Series in Poetry.