NYRB Poets: Vivek Narayanan presents "After," with Aditya Bahl

Poet Vivek Narayanan joins us to present his new collection "After" - inspired by the Ramayana - in conversation with Aditya Bahl. This virtual event, brought to you as part of our ongoing series with our friends at New York Review Books, took place on Zoom. To purchase a copy of the book (and support Community Bookstore): communitybooks...
About the book:
"After" is a collection of poems inspired by Valmiki’s "Ramayana," one of Asia’s foundational epic poems 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.
About our guests:
Vivek Narayanan is one of the best-known Indian poets writing in English. His books of poetry include "Universal Beach" and "Life and Times of Mr S." He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. A full-length collection of his poems in Swedish translation was published in 2015 by the legendary Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand. He currently teaches creative writing at George Mason University and is a member of the editorial board at Poetry Daily, where he helps to select poems and writes short essays about world poetry.
Aditya Bahl is a PhD candidate in English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of four chapbooks of poetry including MUKT (NYC: Organism for Poetic Research, 2021) and NAME AMEN (Malmö: Timglaset, 2018). He has written about art, literature, and politics for New Left Review, The Nation, The Caravan, Jacobin, and Himal, among other publications. In 2023-24, he will be a fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies.