Sweet World

WINNER OF THE 2019 FLORIDA BOOK AWARD

Sweet World reveals a 21^st century life in the midst of an epidemic. It’s not about hating, battling, or even ultimately surviving the ravages of the epidemic as much as it is an homage to a life that continues even as the illness exists within the fabric of the body—the body, which is not victim, but vehicle for love, light, and growth. It is about a cease-fire with the disease while the soul steps up and takes the lead. Simply put, it’s about the challenges and ultimate joys of one woman’s life as she recreates herself in a time of breast cancer.

Maureen Seaton has authored numerous poetry collections, both solo and collaborative. Her honors include the Lambda Literary Award, NEA, Illinois Arts Council Grant, Audre Lorde Award, and the Pushcart. Her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008 & 2018), also garnered a “Lammy”. With poet Denise Duhamel, she co-authored Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, and New Collaborations (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015); and with poet Neil de la Flor, she co-edited the anthology Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos (Anhinga Press, 2018). Seaton is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Miami and published Sweet World with CavanKerry Press in 2019.

Maureen Seaton is that rare thing: a poet’s poet (like Alice Notley, Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, Robert Hayden) and a poet for all of us (also like Notley, Bishop, Auden, Hayden), speaking for and to all of us about our shared human experience, speaking plainly and memorably, with silences followed by pyrotechnics, ordinary speech followed by the most celestial of music. After reading this collection, I began to read it again. And then again. And I’m not done. Will never be done. Mostly I feel astonished that I managed to survive this long without this voice, without these poems. They’re life-changing, but also life-sustaining, these meditations on that which cannot be comprehended in anything except poetry, by a poet who seems to have been brought to us to help us understand this. Maureen Seaton, in an act of artistic generosity and aesthetic near-perfection (since perfection would never be good enough for this poet), has given us Sweet World, shared a glimpse of exactly that which her title references with us, as she’s also allowed us to witness its apocalyptic destruction, to survive that, and then to watch as she rebuilds it before we’re done catching our breaths, the voice so incredibly funny and rueful and world-weary, but also so full of wisdom and transcendence. I haven’t read anything that moved and amazed me (all this play, and invention) and made me like poetry so much in a long, long, LONG time! Not forgettable, not for cowards, and not a poetry you want to leave this world, sweet or otherwise, without reading.
– Laura Kasischke

Maureen Seaton
Pub Date – March 5, 2019
76 pp
$16
ISBN  978-1-933880-72-3
LaurelBooks