Customer Reviews

Little Ice Age (Contemporary Classics Poetry series)

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At first you think this is going to be easy, the voice is so charming, especially at the beginning. But prickly bits start showing up, knots and wit. This is a complicated poet unafraid to explore new form--some prose poems here--and new feeling. Her last book, Furious Cooking, simmered with anger and delight but this one wants to play more or change more, go somewhere else with feeling. "Near Wild Heaven," "Fiddleheads," "endometriosis" stand out in a stand-out book. Pop music (and culture) is sometimes invoked, not so much to place the work in time but more like this is what we've got, make it beautiful.

Little Ice Age is a tough book. It moves fast, deftly, through images, through the language of a speaker who is trying to find sense in her memory and experience. This speaker asks us to follow her, demands our attention. I connect to these poems as poet and as a person. They touch the deepest and most complicated parts of being human, being woman, being lesbian. I first read Maureen Seaton when a friend let me borrow a copy of Furious Cooking. I became immediatly hooked on her metaphor, her language, the connections she made between words and feeling. This book continues to do what I first admired Maureen for. Is this the face of contempory American poetry? I hope so. Prose poems, free verse, formal work...this is what poetry is all about. Plus, it's wonderful, deep, heart-wrenching, amazing. This is an excellent book. Buy it.