Daughter-Seed

by Arielle Tipa

Debut poetry collection from Arielle Tipa

“‘And everything is so beautiful I want to cry,’ Tipa writes in this fever dream work of suffering and want and doubt and spells cast. Told in striking but sincere language, this feels like peeking behind the curtain into something beautiful and new.”

— Lisa Marie Basile, author of Nympholepsy (with Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein, Inside the Castle 2018) and Light Magic for Dark Times (Fair Winds Press 2018)


“Arielle Tipa's Daughter-Seed is a book of crooked teeth. In these poems, women grow in wrong, are uprooted violently, and grow back wrong again. Late capitalist life becomes mythical, primordial, as condolences are sent to chefs and bodies glitch botanical. In Daughter-Seed, the body is dismembered, unsexed, unloved, unkinked, yet the self remains whole though wholly absent, a breadcrumb trail followed by unwanted children, stillborn babes. To read Daughter-Seed is to inherit something sacred and blood-soaked, is to enter into a severed matrilineage, is to know the feminine folklore of warm saliva. To read Daughter-Seed is to walk into the woods and find a MISSING poster with your face on it. Finishing the book, you'll wonder where you've seen that girl before.”

— June Gehringer, author of I Don’t Write About Race (Civil Coping Mechanisms 2018) and I Love You It Looks Like Rain (Be About It Press 2017)

Genres: Poetry

28 pages, Paperback

First published January 18, 2019

Reviews

[Miggy Angel]

If every girl/daughter is a seed, what will that seed become? What plume, bloom, or vegetation? Maybe it’s true, that “the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.” That the seed of her being is a blue-bell blueprint, genesis of genes, traumatic histories and memories mapping destinies predestined, societal soldering of gender-norms, which she inherits. But, maybe it’s also true that poetry is a magic that wills the seed to roll beyond the fields, weeds and trees of its seedling, never quite escaping the leave-roof awning of her childhood homes and her beholdens’ reach, but entering new woods, forests and fields, finding and unearthing other wonders and ways of being, of seeing and being seen, seed diving down into untilled ground and growing out in awkward and awe-filled directions, personage of poems and plumes. Daughter-Seed is that magic.

My review on Burning House Press here: https://burninghousepress.com/2019/01...

[Erin Moran]

Daughter-Seed was one of my most-anticipated releases of the new year and I was absolutely not disappointed. In her debut chapbook, Arielle Tipa comes at you with omens and teeth and fresh fruit and grief and I promise you'll only want more. "everything is so beautiful I want to cry"

Will be reading again and again and again.

[Beckykokitus]

Absolutely gorgeous debut collection from Arielle Tipa! These poems literally ooze with the sensory experience of girlhood and womanhood, and are consistently visceral and sensual with dreamlike, enchanted undertones. Devoured this book in one sitting.

[Lexi Vranick]

This is the kind of book that settles deep in your bones and reaches into the most shielded parts of your soul. Each poem packs a punch, and you're breathless from it all by the time you close the back cover. I found myself flipping right back through it a second time just to be sure I caught every nuance, every little word, every tiny metaphor. This book is a small fire. It'll catch in your heart if you let it, and you won't want to put it out.

[Miss December]

Quite simply, I love this little book. The macabre dream-like poems that are spaced throughout will hit you days after you've read them and call to you for repeat readings. An darkly enchanting debut from someone I look forward to reading again.

[Kolleen]

This is a gorgeous book. Tipa's command of language and imagery is astounding. I can't wait for more from her.