Allison Seay Q&A on the genesis of her poems
Allison Seay talks about the genesis of the poems that make up her collection To See the Queen.
Allison Seay
Allison Seay Q&A on the pleasure and pain of writing
Allison Seay talks about the inextricable tie between the pleasure and pain of writing poetry.
The Queen
The figment is the same as the sadness sometimes. Wild gold and dark red. The color of snow under a streetlamp. Or of smoke pluming from a house under a white sky in the morning. The color of a queen. I try to keep her, even while she is leaving and even after […]
The Difficult Way
The difficult way is mouthful by little mouthful soft soft loud a string of sweet autumnal days and then a Day of nothingness only numb gray brimming hours upon hours etcetera etcetera when it feels people are standing closer to me than I am standing to them what do they all do the people when […]
God’s Woods
The worst part of seeing figments is not seeing them. My life is not so hard except for that—alone in a world which moves around me as a silent film, or is too far away to touch, or is as a fantasy. I am as distant to myself as someone I read […]
Bathing
I have been alone with the thing itself. The depression. The defective heart. God. Inside my mind it is dawn. A wolf appears with a bird in its mouth. Blue feathers, my fate, the beautiful white throat. "Bathing" is from To See the Queen (Persea Books, 2013).
To See the Queen
Since I was the one who had been ill, it was she who came to see me. Everyone wanted a glimpse of her. The people emerged from their houses toward mine and with such caution. They made a visor of their hands. It was as if they were to be accounted for, wading the long […]
Allison Seay
Allison Seay is the recipient of fellowships from the Ruth Lilly Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her first book of poems, To See the Queen, won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize from Persea Books. Other work has appeared in such journals as Crazyhorse, The Southern Review, The Hollins Critic, Poetry, and Pleiades. She teaches at The Collegiate […]