After

After is a collection of poems inspired by Valmiki’s Ramayana, one of India’s foundational epics and a story cycle of incalculable historical importance.

But After does not just come after the Ramayana. On each successive page, Vivek Narayanan brings the resources of contemporary English poetry to bear on the Sanskrit epic. In a work that warrants comparison with Christopher Logue’s and Alice Oswald’s reshapings of Homer, and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Narayanan allows the ancient voice of the poem to engage with modern experience, initiating a transformative conversation across time.

Leaping, fierce poems that move in several directions, leaving the reader besieged and dazzled in equal measure

TISHANI DOSHI, The Poetry Review

[T]his timeless epic … [has] taken a new shape in Narayanan’s formidable English

ROSANNA WARREN

[A] tour de force, radicalizing our apprehension of beauty

KEVIN McGRATH, Harvard Review

The only thing more amazing than Narayanan’s ambition is his realization of that ambition

VIJAY SESHADRI