When is a Burning Tree

by Christina Seymour, Ami Kaye (Editor)

Christina Seymour's generous, insightful When is a Burning Tree shines its brilliance on the unexpected lyrical connections between the human world and the natural one so that under its influence we recognize even "the earthworm, with its two sexes and five impossible hearts" or "the tiniest snail gripping rock-face" as fellow travelers exactly as humble as ourselves.
--Lisa Lewis, author of The Body Double and Burned House with Swimming Pool


In Christina Seymour's splendid, delicate collection she uses images from paintings and natural landscapes to describe her own vivid interior life. The speaker of these poems tells "Any living thing is as good as a Renoir"; she knows "There's only so much preparing / for the flood of acorns, their soft meat / crumbled in piles on the sidewalk"; she opens "a small attic window for truth." Seymour's poems are quiet, precise, and powerful.
--Faith Shearin, author of  The Owl Question  and  Darwin's Daughter


In the light of the mind our one-and-only world is beautifully imperfect, "familiar and foreign at once." Christina Seymour's poems make it so. Just so. 
--Carol Frost, author of  Three Lyric Sequences

76 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2018