... small moments of intense personal intimacy ... Seshadri’s transitions from human interactions to the natural world feel seamless, so that a poem about a brown bear smacking a salmon from a stream can say as much about the human condition as it does about the apex predator. Other juxtapositions cause welcome disruptions ... More often than not, these stark contrasts read as a playful invitation to join Seshadri’s speakers on a strange and challenging journey.
Seshadri’s poems are testily smart, often funny, conceptually intricate and so chock-full of irony that it’s hard to avoid making a pun here involving magnets or multivitamins ... The essence of Seshadri’s writing is conversation, and that conversation is coiling and liquid, not diffident. Seshadri is fluent in an unusually wide range of forms — he ranges here from rhymed quatrains to fat blocks of prose — and his voice is typically chatty, probing, importuning, self-mocking.
In an engaging, confiding tone that embraces both wit and compassion, Seshadri enlists poetry, what he calls 'spooky action at a distance,' to assure us that despite the historical moment's forced isolation and heightened sociopolitical stress, we need not feel we're alone.
... this contemplative fourth collection deploys his trademark philosophical mode with less sharply defined edges, and more room for interruptions and diversion ... These poems movingly capture the feeling of being suspended in a moment, as well as in a culturally mandated experience ... Fans of Seshadri will find the thoughtfulness, humor, and lyric precision they have come to expect from the poet.
