We’re pleased to announce that we will be publishing Christina Seymour’s Flowers around Your Soft Throat as our second chapbook, and our first of poetry. This collection explores death, love, and hope, pacing through death’s shadowy valley and beginning an ascent of the opposite rim. Seymour writes of the frailty of the heart; she pities “the earthworm, with its two sexes and five impossible hearts.” But these poems aren’t simply a confessional or autobiographical arc. There are ekphrastic pieces on Song Dynasty silks, Mark Rothko, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and an imitation of Psalm 45. Seymour’s style is textured and detailed with a subtle musicality as evidenced in ‘Sacred’:
The crinkled gingko leaf shifts like a cricket for a moment before succumbing to stillness. Each imagined boat on the harbor of a well-lit memory is still, just as I sit quietly long enough to maybe feel finished, like him. One pinprick is a seashell, becoming water from a point, and still the shadows grow across some distant prairie, absent each of us.
The chapbook will be available for purchase later this year.
—ML
Photo (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by Thibauld Nion.