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The Present State of the Garden
Winner of the 2020 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry
In The Present State of the Garden, both childhood and the natural world are elegized as the speaker works through layers of the dissolution of a marriage and a world on the brink of ecological collapse. She attempts to patch together some kind of new Eden in these aftermaths and to make a home and family from the remnants--memories from girlhood, a stray aunt and a niece, and what’s left of her small, once lush garden after the punishing storms of summer. The Present State of the Garden is a clear-eyed, open-hearted poetic memoir.
In The Present State of the Garden, both childhood and the natural world are elegized as the speaker works through layers of the dissolution of a marriage and a world on the brink of ecological collapse. She attempts to patch together some kind of new Eden in these aftermaths and to make a home and family from the remnants--memories from girlhood, a stray aunt and a niece, and what’s left of her small, once lush garden after the punishing storms of summer. The Present State of the Garden is a clear-eyed, open-hearted poetic memoir.
80 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 20, 2021
Heather Sellers new poetry collection is a beguiling exploration inside the Present State of the Garden of this poet’s stunning and memorably enchanting poems. We discover verses connecting former flames, poems dedicated to her late mother and my favorite is when Sellers let’s us into her own personal Florida.
In poems like “Interstate Four Ode,” the reader is taken on a journey down the highway of the speaker’s imagination as a child taking the wheel from the backseat and bringing to life the humid swampy palm tree paradise that Sellers loves to recreate in her most breathtaking poems.
And then there’s “After Class” the Harry Potter inspired classic in which the speaker ends the poem with a haunting metaphor for life of last line: “The unending losses—they’ve not even begun.” Although there is loss in many of the poems of Sellers poetic Garden, there is also hope every time we dive inside the Present State, you will want to revisit the mesmerizing interstate world of Heather Sellers’s Florida muse.
In poems like “Interstate Four Ode,” the reader is taken on a journey down the highway of the speaker’s imagination as a child taking the wheel from the backseat and bringing to life the humid swampy palm tree paradise that Sellers loves to recreate in her most breathtaking poems.
And then there’s “After Class” the Harry Potter inspired classic in which the speaker ends the poem with a haunting metaphor for life of last line: “The unending losses—they’ve not even begun.” Although there is loss in many of the poems of Sellers poetic Garden, there is also hope every time we dive inside the Present State, you will want to revisit the mesmerizing interstate world of Heather Sellers’s Florida muse.
August 14, 2022
Heather Sellers explores loss beautifully in this collection. I really enjoy her fun with words along with her descriptions of nature. If ya get the chance, buy this book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews