WHAT PEOPLE SAY
— Name, Title
With "Mechanical Cluster," Patty Seyburn has established, without question, that she is one of the most original and exciting poets writing today. Using the Ford Motor Company's term for the automobile's grouping of warning lights and gauges on the instrument panel as her title and metaphor, Seyburn explores a Detroit childhood to a California adulthood. Growing up, confronting the sometimes confounding adult world, and then (eventually) entering that same world through love and marriage, Seyburn's language is both familiar and elusive. This is a compelling, rich book that makes you feel and think at the same time.
-- Daniel Olivas
More on Mechanical Cluster...
In the series of marriage poems titled “Ketubah” for the Jewish marriage contract, it examines ritual and rebellion, the necessary and ancillary components of love. In the series of “riffs” on film titled “Celluloid,” the narrator floats and digresses through associative waves of apprehension. The book delves into heritage and inheritance in a constant re-evaluation of what it means to be a morass of “pulse and impulse.” The voice of these poems inhabits and strays, puts down roots and abandons, goes West, goes East, attempting to define “progress” through some understanding of vehicle and trip with a revving engine in the background.