Sebastian Agudelo was born in Mexico City. His first book, To the Bone, won the 2008 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize selected by Mark Doty. His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Manchester Review, and elswhere. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and daughter.

Books by Sebastian Agudelo:

Other poems on the web by Sebastian Agudelo:
"Commute"

About Each Chartered Street:

"Each Chartered Street is awake, alert, alive-a paean to and document of Philadelphia and its troubled, troubling inhabitants. Here are poems novelistic in reach, various in technique, rich and dense as a city in their lingo. Sebastian. Agudelo writes of applicants for food court jobs, neoNazi baby showers, the 'sputtery fizz of police radio,' 'bricks buckling, collapsed roofs,' a neighbor who won't pick up after her dog, grownups airing 'the sour of marriage on the sidewalk.' Somehow none of this is a downer. Instead we get news of the world, and of people that seldom make it into poetry, rendered with such detail and complexity that it's pure pleasure. Agudelo is tuned in to what's wrong in America but there's also something remarkably hopeful in his attentive, intense, clear-eyed scrutiny."
—Daisy Fried

"In poems that emit the whir of the world, Agudelo surveys a wide swath of urban life, Philadelphia functioning for him as London did for William Blake. 'Whose city is this?' Oedipus asks in one of the poems, and the poet's answer is a public servant on his daily commute, oddments of Western Civilization in his satchel, singing as he goes."
—Lucia Perillo