That Was Now, This Is Then
Poems
by Vijay Seshadri
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Pub Date Oct 06 2020 | Archive Date Nov 06 2020
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Description
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.”
A Note From the Publisher
Advance Praise
Advance Praise for That Was Now, This Is Then
“Vijay Seshadri is arch and canny, a maestro of noir ironies. But this sophistication protects flashes of the Romantic sublime ‘when the last star hisses out’ and, more crucially, grief for a dead father and for the world’s outrageous violence. These are poems of lacerating self-awareness and stoic compassion. That Was Now, This Is Then is a book we need, right now.”—Rosanna Warren
“I am reading Vijay Seshadri’s That Was Now, This Is Then inside the COVID-19 outbreak, when people are dying and governments lie, but this poet's uncompromising, direct music sustains. Seshadri’s is a voice that speaks honestly, without any patronizing, a voice that wants to see in each of us ‘the free person, the truly free, free from time, space,’ a voice that is unafraid to tell the ugly but necessary truth about the species, about ‘the ghost we call meaning, / the solution for which we are the problem.’”—Ilya Kaminsky
“Vijay Seshadri conjures the poems in That Was Now, This Is Then out of absence, fashions language from the vast and wild silences surrounding our living. . . . When Seshadri tells us there is ‘not one phoebe in the woods getting ready to sing,’ that’s an apophatic invocation, an invitation. It’s actual magic. We hear the birdsong, then we don’t. That Was Now, This Is Then is, inconceivably, Seshadri’s best yet.”—Kaveh Akbar
Marketing Plan
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Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781644450369 |
| PRICE | $24.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 88 |
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