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Chapbook: 'Flowers Around Your Soft Throat'
By
Structo
Christina Seymour’s chapbook, Flowers Around Your Soft Throat, follows up her 2014 Structo psalms contest winning entry, expanding upon its themes of domesticity, loss, and aging. Through meditations on nature and familial relationships, ekphrasis poems, and psalm translation, Seymour explores the cycles of our lives – children become parents, we outlive our dogs, grief gives way to acceptance. The collection’s last poem, 'The World Solves Itself', gives away the conclusion on the book, but getting there is a pleasure we’re sure you’ll enjoy.
Praise for 'Flowers Around Your Soft Throat':
“Christina Seymour’s presence is a rare gift. From just over here, she observes and honors the lived moment, investigating its edges and finding the urgency and loveliness of spirit there."
— James Harms, author of The Only Lie Worth Telling: New and Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press)
“This collection explores death, love, and hope, pacing through death’s shadowy valley and beginning an ascent of the opposite rim. Seymour writes of the frailty of the heart; she pities “the earthworm, with its two sexes and five impossible hearts”. But these poems aren’t simply a confessional or autobiographical arc. There are ekphrastic pieces on Song Dynasty silks, Mark Rothko, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and an imitation of Psalm 45. Seymour’s style is textured and detailed with a subtle musicality."
— Matthew Landrum, Structo Poetry Editor