“Perez’s debut chapbook is an important contribution. It is a work unafraid of testing the capacity of the intricate to not only live alongside the simple, but survive it. It is work where one might find a place to live.” - Ben Bartu
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“Humbly and struck by awe, Kelly R. Samuels' poems tremble in sight of all that cannot survive an environment that warms and shifts and swallows up our once-was, our earth and its serendipitous creations. Samuels' pained and intricate noticing brings the elegy into a new, harrowing manifestion, as the death that is mourned cannot help but blame the mourner.... This is a book of stunning ethical and poetic heights, a necessary field guide for our threatened, and only, field.” -Katie Ford
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“Oblivescence tests the line between what we say and who we are…As a mother’s dementia progresses, memories grow motheaten and encounters slippery. But stripped of language’s pretense, the resulting flashes and fragments, the orphaned prepositions and double negatives bring us to the edge of what matters: inescapable material truths…and intimate experiences alive in moral detail, like the burying of a dead deer, part frenzy, part rectitude, part tenderness.” - Allison Adair, author of The Clearing
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“In crisply heartbreaking poems, Kelly R. Samuels speaks not so much to Alice as toward a recklessly hopeful younger self. Don't follow down the rabbit hole of hoped-for love. Wake up by the river. Forget the dreams. Hurry home before dark.” - William Stobb, author of You Are Still Alive
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Dancing Girl Press, 2023.
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“In these twenty-six poems – one for each letter – words that are infrequently used by some of us serve as springboards, prompting introspection and reflection.”
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“Zeena / Zenobia Speaks engages in the essential lyric task of giving voice to the voiceless. In these poems, the taciturn meets the turn of well-wrought lines that wring meaning from the quiet sufferings of Wharton’s iconic character. Wharton’s Zeena emerges in complexity and depth, her suppressed cry released and shaped in poems of potent imagery and clipped syntax that ‘can manage the weight of snow’ and the ‘threat of fire.’”
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“Fear pervades this book, as the title, geologic catastrophe or its inevitable potential, suggests. Before and after. Carrying ancient Old Testament misogyny forward with inevitability into current headlines or hospitals, overlaying the man-made with the older natural violences of fire and flood, a human female life knits together with intelligence, inquiry, and an imagistic eye, a “standing place,” for us all. A place of dread. You should read it.” - Linda McCarriston, author of Eva-Mary and Talking Soft Dutch
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“I too have lived on that glittering edge” Heidi Seaborn writes. Indeed. Seaborn’s voice is lively and urbane; vivid pains and pleasures abound on every page of this lush, glitteringly alive new book of poems.” - Deborah Landau, author of Soft Targets and Uses of the Body
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“Here in tingling verbs, are the noticed and unnoticed "bite marks" of a woman aging, of loss noticed in flesh, in body, in mirror, of body gouged, lashed and disappearing. In precise poems edged with grief, Heidi Seaborn inhabits and exposes, the self, the family, leading us to, in an almost perfect order of poems, a deepening forest of earth, of soul. These poems are beautifully written, perfectly on point, each poem a prism facet, glowing.” - Veronica Golos, author of GIRL
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“This poet brings us the sea, the flower bed, small things dying, a heart – all alive and kicking, Heidi Seaborn is a poet of verbs: ice keens, land shoulders an island, clamshells splay and split, things flap and stack; there are fields of flamboyant pink; gardens snap and silos crest —a heart taken out, pulses…this is a remarkable debut of a poet to keep watching.” - Veronica Golos, author of GIRL
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“Give a Girl Chaos (and see what she can do) is a survival guide for chaotic times and lives told through poems that ache with violence, beauty and ultimately joy.”
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“I just finished reading Once a Diva by Heidi Seaborn for the third time and am still laughing out loud. These poems are funny, witty, naughty, irresistible and just plain fun. Oh...and extremely well-written! Hard to imagine anyone could begin the first one and not, immediately, read all the way through to the end—they are that engaging and enticing. Makaela Dokken's sassy illustrations punctuate the satire with an extra chuckle. Brava to the Diva!” - Lillo Way, author of Lend Me Your Wings
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“The ten poems in Christina Seymour’s debut chapbook, Flowers Around Your Soft Throat, raise everyday suburban life to the level of the sublime.” —Rebecca Foster, Small Press Book Review
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“In Christina Seymour’s splendid, delicate collection she uses images from paintings and natural landscapes to describe her own vivid interior life. The speaker of these poems tells us: “Any living thing is as good as a Renoir”; she knows “There’s only so much preparing / for the flood of acorns, their soft meat / crumbled in piles on the sidewalk”; she opens “a small attic window for truth.” Seymour’s poems are quiet, precise, and powerful.” - Faith Shearin, author of The Owl Question and Darwin’s Daughter
Gridiron Fables is a set of 16 'erasure fables', one for every week of the NFL season at the time the collection was made. The source text is a weekly montage of 'useless sound' bites from NFL postgame press conferences and analysis, compiled and curated by producer Billy Gil for their cliched, circular meaninglessness for The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, a radio show formerly of ESPN.
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“Alex Shapiro doesn’t write of a fallen world. He writes of our consciousness, our environment, our vitality floating, achingly, mid-air. His words seek to chingar, pulse, photosynthesize, disrupt us. In Insect Architecture, we read of bodies reacting to their interior and exterior confines, we handle with care, we transform into the connectors that bind us–through the lens of a poet who grips us tight before letting us go.” - Natasha Mijares, author of violent wave
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“Unsuspecting Cinderella is what happens after the glass slipper slips on and the prince carries the poet off to the castle. These are pensive, incisive lines of deep hungers(I want you to want me like a fever breaking), and the Midas-like emptiness at the castle that leaves one curled into a ball and opening umbrellas on the inside. It's the cautionary tale of compromising our truest self for a life that is both more than enough and nowhere near enough. A chapbook that reads like a novel written on a silver matchbook.” - Teri Youmans
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“Smile, Child is a brief portrait of growing up in a broken home and society where abuse is normalized. Each poem illustrates a different aspect of what it means to limp through life carrying generational trauma and suffering major losses while navigating a sick nation and uncertain future. The confusion, grief, and injustice are palpable with each stanza revealing more about the author’s inner world.”
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I have memories of my dad telling me and my sisters ghost stories every other weekend after my parents divorced, being immersed in the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, and experiencing paranormal activity often at my grandparents’ farmhouse as well as poltergeist-like activity in my own home. My mother told me of a story when I was no more than a year old; I would refuse to go into this one house. I'd be kicking and screaming, hysterical. Not long after my episodes, the house burnt down. I have a tendency to be hypervigilant which might account for my extrasensory abilities, or perhaps it’s the other way around. It’s been said I'm highly sensitive and clairvoyant and haunted. It isn't uncommon for the running theme in the majority of my work to be about death. I became well acquainted with loss around the same time I began reading and my grandpa died in his house from lung cancer. After that there were two suicides in my family, one being my sister, Heather. I do mention suicide more than once within my collection, which also includes themes of transitions, growing up, family dysfunction, illnesses, trauma, and other bizarre, dark matters.
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