No one blends ironic intelligence, emotional frankness, radical awareness, and intricate humor the way Vijay Seshadri does. His fourth collection takes on the paradoxes of time and space, destabilizing highly tuned lyrics and elegies with sharp and exquisite turns in poems steeped in the complexities of being a self in the world, and being a human among other humans. 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." That Was Now, This Is Then affirms Seshadri's place as one of America's greatest living poets.