The Ripped-Out Seam: Poems [Paperback]

Rebecca Seiferle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1993

This is the prize-winning poet's first collection. The poems in this collection are various in style, from the highly experimental to shape poems to prose poems to sequences, and in subject matter, from the personal subjects of family, to various landscapes, predominantly that of New Mexico, and to historical and philosophical themes. The volume contains two collections: THE RIPPED-OUT SEAM and VOLTE, and etchings from the great Spanish painter Goya.
Poems from this collection won the Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America: the Bogin Award is given to a group of four or five poems that reflect "the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary, uses language in an original way, and takes a stand against oppression in any of its forms." Poems from the volume also won the Writers' Exchange Award, and the volume itself was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Poems in the volume previously appeared in American Poetry Review, The American Writer, Blue Mesa Review, Calyx, Carolina Quarterly, Croton Review, Cutbank, Indiana Review, Negative Capability, PSA News, Poem, South Coast Poetry Journal, The Taos Review, Triquarterly, The Denny Poems and have been anthologized in NEW MEXICO POETRY RENAISSANCE, (Red Crane 1994) and SALUDOS: POEMAS DE NUEVO MEXICO (Pennywhistle Press 1995).

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In keeping with their Southwestern locale, Seiferle's poems have a natural, prosey gait well suited to limning images of sun-washed pueblos and ancient tribal rituals. But this matter-of-fact directness also powerfully complements the poet's fascination with the violence underlying daily life, the sundering of bodies and souls from their ordinary, expected place in the scheme of things. While Seiferle has an unsettling tendency to see the skull beneath the skin, to imagine "it must be unbearable/ to enter the eye of God and see everywhere/ the perishing," she also has a way with small, vivid details: a "hand-carved and brightly painted santo is/ nailed into his niche, as if, otherwise,/ he might come down dancing"; patterned shards of pottery "scored/ by a haphazard geometry" or wildflowers "dusting/ the mesas with the cobalt electricity/ of their petals." These are thoughtful, textured poems by a poet who is able to fuse the intellectual with the visceral. Recommended for collections of contemporary poetry.
- Christine Stenstrom, Shea & Gould Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

" Her voice and vision are everywhere!" -- Ray Gonzalez, for the 1994 Paterson Poetry Prize, for which The Ripped-Out Seam was a finalist.

"Rich in particularity and in her engagement with these particulars, Rebecca Seiferle's eye does not blink or turn away from the horrible. Rather, the details of a maimed creature she has bludgeoned `so it will no longer suffer' are included in her vision of personal responsibility and a world she has chosen to love as it is. Her voice is mythic while unassumingly candid, narrative while energized with mythic images and a lyrical ear." -- Jacaranda Review, 1994

"Seiferle is a fine poet and surely worthy of a collection...And Sheep Meadow Press has produced another beautifully printed book. Poems that...are wonderful...`In the Kidding Pen,' `Buddha Seesaw,' `Unidentified Flowers,' and a long poem, `Twelve Theorems of Desire.' Seiferle is a poet to watch. -- Choice, January, 1994

"To raise the ghost of Eliot...Seiferle has what he described as characteristic of the Renaissance but missing in the poetry of the modern age: `unified sensibility.' Hers is a world where everything matters; she writes about dismemberment out of a sense of wholeness betrayed, of connectedness outraged. One expression of that wholeness is her capaciousness of imagination, the vast historical and geological scope of its landscapes of concern, the proportion that scale restores. Stanley Moss of The Sheep Meadow Press is to be complimented for his decision to present Seiferle's work in a double volume-154 pages of poetry. In a time when poetry books come thin, short of pages and sparsely populated with words (and sometimes scant on thought as well) the amplitude of this book is welcome proof of another possibility." -- Prairie Schooner, Fall 1994

Intellectual, visceral, spiritual work of the first water - the brilliant poetry of Rebecca Seiferle has an authority that argues for an ancient source, that retains its poise in the face of tragic horror. . . . -- Eleanor Wilner

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 169 pages
• Publisher: Sheep Meadow; 1st edition (December 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1878818228
• ISBN-13: 978-1878818225
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,456,527 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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