Rachel Cohen

Vijay Seshadri

American Encounters

Chance Meeting

poems

3 sections

The brilliant new collection from Vijay Seshadri, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning 3 Sections No one blends ironic intelligence, emotional frankness, radical self-awareness, and complex humor the way Vijay Seshadri does. In this, his fourth collection, he affirms his place as one of America’s greatest living poets. That Was Now, This Is Then 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.”

Poems

That Was Now, This Is Then

The second collection of poems by the author of Wild Kingdom and the winner of the 2003 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets presents new poems that are brimming with humor and dynamism, focusing on the line between history and metaphysics in both long narrative verse and rhyming lyrical snapshots.

The Long Meadow

Poets at Work

Wild Kingdom marks the debut of an audacious new voice in American poetry. Vijay Seshadri's poems inhabit the crossroads of history and wilderness, the imaginative realm where fir and alder trees share a common life with reggae bands, refugees, office buildings, and speeding traffic.

Wild Kingdom

* Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry * The long-awaited third poetry book by Vijay Seshadri, "one of the most respected poets working in America today" (Time Out New York) Vijay Seshadri's new poetry is assured and expert, his line as canny as ever. In an array of poetic forms from the rhyming lyric to the philosophical meditation to the prose essay, 3 Sections confronts perplexing divisions of contemporary life—a wayward history, an indeterminate future, and a present condition of wanting to outthink time. This is an extraordinary book, witty and vivacious, by one of America's best poets.

Vijay Seshadri

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