“These poems wrestle with the cosmic without losing sight of the personal…. Wistful yet undaunted, this collection forges new beginnings out of elegy.”—Publishers Weekly
“These formally various poems are made in the ‘body’s vernacular.’ Cellular, full of becomings and endings, alert toward ‘the arrival of the infinite:’ Chet’la Sebree’s language becomes a strand of desire, a string of scream. Taking up questions of Black maternity, illness, desire, and grief, Blue Opening is an intimate and needed record. Sensuous and deft. Exquisitely made: ‘hulling, from blue rock, faith.” —Aracelis Girmay, editor of So We Can Know
“This book moves with measured, meticulous, and tender interiority. Each poem investigates what it means to grieve both the ancestral beloved and the not-yet-born. Blue Opening skillfully navigates the challenges of wanting ‘the truth to sound poetic’ while acknowledging the piercing realities and ‘root logic’ of womb, breast, brain, and heart. These verses do not shy from disappointment and regret. But the body does not exist here as failure, even with its limitations. On the contrary, this book offers gentle yet startling and philosophical contemplations of creation and origin, and an unapologetic longing to be a mother.” —Yona Harvey, author of You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love
“Blue Opening is a source energy, an essential tincture, and an unrelenting examination into the depths of ache, faith, mortality, and the cosmos. In this expansively concise collection, Chet’la Sebree deploys a tender and inventive poetics of dexterous inquiry to transmute life’s vastness toward a constellation of possibilities and care. Sebree is unafraid to give voice to elusive truths on the page, acknowledging, ‘Here, I can unlearn everything I’ve been taught, begin to accept things as they are.’ Fully embracing uncertainty, Sebree is prismatic, refracting Blue Opening into a luminous knowing, for she affirms, ‘In matrilineal suffering, I know healing begins with me.’ In this book, from the seams to the unseeming, Sebree affixes a new forward for all that days that follow.” —Anthony Cody, author of The Rendering
A rare and auspicious gift.—Ama Codjoe Bluest Nude: Poems
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