Review by Booklist Review
Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection 3 Sections (2013), Seshadri is known for elaborate lines and evocative images, and he has built a career around the unexpected turns his lyrics often take. This new collection is no exception, conjuring small moments of intense personal intimacy, as well as broad snapshots of surprising expanses, as when the murmuration of bureaucracy in a downtown office building transforms into the reverberating echoes among upside-down bats in a limestone cavern. 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: a poem called "Nemesis," addressed to Snoopy, the lovable, comic-strip canine, precedes lyrics that are downright apocalyptic: "civilizations teetering on the edge of time, about to take the plunge / into oblivion." More often than not, these stark contrasts read as a playful invitation to join Seshadri's speakers on a strange and challenging journey.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
After the maximalist approach of Seshadri's Pulitzer Prize--winning 3 Sections, this contemplative fourth collection deploys his trademark philosophical mode with less sharply defined edges, and more room for interruptions and diversion. The first of the book's three sections features poems for the age of distraction. In "Robocall," a ringing landline causes "Three or four brand-new ideas--not crisp/ or sensical but, still, helpful to me--" to flee. The second section is anchored in grief; in "Collins Ferry Landing," an elegy to Seshadri's father, the poet observes, "Only rivers bottom out like this" before the lineated poem transforms into a dense prose block. These poems movingly capture the feeling of being suspended in a moment, as well as in a culturally mandated experience: "I wasn't just feeling grief but congratulating myself for it," the speaker admits. The book's final section ranges more broadly; one speaker notes that it is "at least a relief to know... you can emerge and re-enter the public sphere." Fans of Seshadri will find the thoughtfulness, humor, and lyric precision they have come to expect from the poet. (Oct.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
This fourth collection by Pulitzer-winner Seshadri (for 2014's 3 Sections) finds the poet haunted by "the ghost we call meaning." It's a candid recognition of the psychic and spiritual trauma these disruptive times have wrought, particularly "the violence done to the mind by the weaponized/ word or image." Chief among the disorienting effects is a troubling desensitization: "all this hostility from every quarter bothers me/ much less than it should. Why the disconnect? I can't figure it out." But while the public sphere is "busy making gossip out of experience" and undermining any sense of shared reality, Seshadri does his best to draw coherence from chaos. In "To the Reader," the final poem in the book, he reaches out to us in a gesture of magical solidarity: "We correspond 1 to 1, and there is a grandeur in this." VERDICT 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.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
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