Böcker av Patty Seyburn

Threshold Delivery takes a lyrical look at how we approach the death of our loved ones - and how we confront the various thresholds in our lives. These poems guide the reader through ritual, tradition, and mystical interpretations of how and why we mourn, and how we conduct our lives after knowing grief. Though referencing Jewish tradition, these poems ask the reader to confront their own strategies and observance. They call upon pathos, personal history and humor, confronting the everyday with no shortage of joy, irony, and bafflement. Poems range from short personal meditations and anecdotal narratives to associative flights of imagination and winding explorations, replete with historical oddities and popular culture. Densely musical and voice driven, poems take the reader on journeys through personal and family history, mapping the movement of the heart and mind through life's most challenging moments. A series of poems, on the surface about Mah Jongg, look at interweaving cultural histories and how the social world affects our behavior, while asking us to consider what we inherit, what we bring with, and what we pass down, as we "draw and discard."

Poetry. Smart and funny, gorgeous and frightened. Whether at the racetrack or in the cul-de-sac. Asking questions of the flawed self or of the idyllic, these poems look headlong at the living world and use all of it. The poems are winding and discursive but also include short, eye-rolling lyrics. Dinner party politics join with lines from Hass, the Bible, and the memory of Detroit (Jericho Brown). Characters in Seyburn's poems do what we all do, only with the skepticism of Plato (Alan Michael Parker).