The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet of 3 Sections takes on the planar paradoxes of time and space, destabilizing highly tuned lyrics and elegies with dizzying turns in poems of unrequitable longing, of longing for longing, of longing to be found, of grief. In these poems, Seshadri's speaker becomes the subject, the reader becomes the writer, and the multiplying refracted narratives yield an 'anguish so pure it almost / feels like joy.'
... 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.
