Our Emily Dickinson lecturer, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Vijay Seshadri, gave a reading last Thursday. Students and faculty filled every seat in Foster Auditorium, and still more stood in the back as Julia Kasdorf introduced Seshadri, describing his work as “imaginatively and concretely expressing what it’s like to be alive.” She even shared her poetry students’ thoughts on his work, how he writes from “the point of view of a watcher among people.” Seshadri began his reading by joking, “since it’s almost Halloween, let’s start with death,” and read A Fable, a narrative poem from his second collection, A Long Meadow. He then read Trailing Clouds of Glory and Nursing Home, followed by a four-poem sequence of lyric poems inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hell, Purgatory: The Film, Purgatory: The Sequel, and Heaven. Afterwards, he continued his reading with a ‘poem of the moment’ called This Morning, then Guide for the Perplexed, Bright Copper Kettles, Thought Problem, and Knowing. His final poem of the night was Light Verse, a poem he wrote for the New York Times to mark the end of daylight savings time.