Wild Kingdom: Poems Paperback - 1996

"Vijay Seshadri's poems are wittily alive to everything, continually quick and surprising, expertly turned."--Richard Wilbur

"Vijay Seshadri tracks 'the signature stinks and blood trails' of our species--its squalor and splendor, seen here with both charity and rage--exhilaratingly in this book. The poems have both electric energy and gravitas. Short and long poems (which is rare) equally have authority. The distinction with which this new voice deciphers the 'Rosetta stone' of our 'defective mythologies' is unmistakable, and absorbing."--Frank Bidart

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.

"These are poems full of musical light and dark wit. Their cadences are wonderfully poised between regret and discovery. Vijay Seshadri is a lyric poet who can mix elegy and affirmation within a few stanzas of one another. He makes the landscape and the cityscape into one challenging and heartbreaking place where the old transformations of language can still happen."--Eaven Boland

Vijay Seshadri was born in India and came to America at age five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio. His work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, the New Yorker, Shenandoah, Antaeus, and AGNI.