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.  

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.  

Seyburn’s third collection Hilarity took New Issues’ 2008 Green Rose Prize. The book is sparkling and smart, and Seyburn is as likely to draw from children’s rhymes or Groucho Marx as she is from Biblical history or classical Greek mythology.  

Mechanical Cluster studies the human machine as it moves through time and space, and the events that humanize us. It compels our interaction with the social world, while heralding the epiphanic moments that stop by as strange and welcome guests. The book is one of journeys and crossing over, of advances and retreats, and of dwelling in liminal states.