One of my favorite books of the year. This was an understated, overpowering, and all around incredible book of poetry. I've sadly never heard of Seshadri before (despite him having won a Pulitizer a few years back) and my mind and soul are better for haing read him. Just look at the subtle sadness and humanism of Goya's Mired Men Fighting with Cudgels:

The violence done to the mind by the weaponized
word or image is bad.
We can live with it, though
We can understand it. Or we can try. And we
can consider ourselves lucky, which we are.
Nothing can be understood
about the blunt-force trauma to the head.
The percussion grenade.
The helmet-to-helmet hit at an aggregate speed
of forty miles an hour.
No concussion protocol comprehends the self’s
delicate apparatus crumpled in the wide pan of the brain.
The roof collapsing in Aleppo.
The beam slamming the frontal lobe.
The drone, the terror by night and day.
He wanted to remember it all,
to fix the image cradled inside the image
of itself, itself, itself
down the facing mirrors of future and past,
and then he wanted to be left to die there,
in the ditch where he was cudgeled
down and under—
ground water seeping into his mouth,
himself becoming ground water.
But he felt a hand reach down and grab him
by the collar and yank him back up
and set him on his feet.
And as he steadied himself, he thought,
This compassion he feels for me as his
mirror enemy, image, brother in wrath,
and that I feel for him,
this compassion is the compassion that those
who see themselves in agony feel.
But there is the other compassion, the one
felt by those who see agony in themselves,
which the deaf master will feel
when he imagines us poised and ready to recapitulate
our thinking’s frozen violence—
the great deaf master,
living in the villa of the deaf,
where he will paint us in silent pastels.

Many of his poems are like that (see also the similar humanistic consideration of the justice system with an extended religious service metaphor in <a href = "https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/94-commas-dashes-ellipses-full-stops-question-marks">Commas, Dashes, Ellipses, Full Stops, Question Marks</a>. But he also understatedly ironic and funny as in Marriage:

Marriage
You keep complaining that there are two people
inside me—

the one confident, decisive, ironic;
the other a raging cripple
who never took to the nipple,
whose life has been one long
episode of colic.

Just admit you don’t know which one you like better,
which one rings your bell.

I happen to like them both.
I make the one drive the other around and around
the glistening night streets of our town
to try and calm him,
calm him down.

I want them to be inseparable, inevitable.
I don’t want the children to suffer.

Not my cup of tea - no real musicality or creative use of language; the entries seemed rather boring.

I have not read poetry this deep and reflective in a long while, so it took me some time to get reacquainted with the commitment that goes along with reading poetry. Regardless of that, I found this collection to be beautifully written. My favorites were Man and Woman Talking, North American Sequence, and Soliloquy.

Such a beautiful collection of poems. These poems explore displacement, weight, variations, and time, among many other topics. A fantastic read!