The Long Meadow: Poems

The extraordinary second collection by Vijay Seshadri, winner of the 2003 James
Laughlin award of The Academy of American Poets

We hold it against you that you survived.
People better than you are dead,
but you still punch the clock.
Your body has wizened but has not bled
-from "Survivor"

Vijay Seshadri's first collection of poems, Wild Kingdom, was celebrated as one of the most exciting debuts in years. In The Long Meadow, Seshadri presents a brilliant array of formally inventive and emotionally powerful new poems in which the poet's wit and vivacity are poised against the alarming complexities of human experience. Through disparate forms and strategies, from the long narrative and the brief rhyming lyric to the prose meditation, The Long Meadow looks into and through our troubled world with a poetic sensibility that transforms history into metaphysics and disaster into possibility. Here is the voice of one of contemporary poetry's new masters.