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Distributed for CavanKerry Press

Sweet World

Sweet World reveals a 21st century life in the midst of an epidemic. It’s not about hating, battling, or even ultimately surviving the ravages of the epidemic as much as it is an homage to a life that continues even as the illness exists within the fabric of the body—the body, which is not victim, but vehicle for love, light, and growth. It is about a cease-fire with the disease while the soul steps up and takes the lead. Simply put, it’s about the challenges and ultimate joys of one woman’s life as she recreates herself in a time of breast cancer.

76 pages | 6 x 9.25


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Reviews

“Maureen Seaton is that rare thing: a poet’s poet (like Alice Notley, Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, Robert Hayden) and a poet for all of us (also like Notley, Bishop, Auden, Hayden), speaking for and to all of us about our shared human experience, speaking plainly and memorably, with silences followed by pyrotechnics, ordinary speech followed by the most celestial of music. After reading this collection, I began to read it again. And then again. And I’m not done. Will never be done. Mostly I feel astonished that I managed to survive this long without this voice, without these poems. They’re life-changing, but also life-sustaining, these meditations on that which cannot be comprehended in anything except poetry, by a poet who seems to have been brought to us to help us understand this. Maureen Seaton, in an act of artistic generosity and aesthetic near-perfection (since perfection would never be good enough for this poet), has given us Sweet World, shared a glimpse of exactly that which her title references with us, as she’s also allowed us to witness its apocalyptic destruction, to survive that, and then to watch as she rebuilds it before we’re done catching our breaths, the voice so incredibly funny and rueful and world-weary, but also so full of wisdom and transcendence. I haven’t read anything that moved and amazed me (all this play, and invention) and made me like poetry so much in a long, long, long time! Not forgettable, not for cowards, and not a poetry you want to leave this world, sweet or otherwise, without reading.”

Laura Kasischke

Table of Contents

Fore/words: 2017 • Tit, with Shelf Life • I Dreamt a Land of Someone Else’s Invention • Two Men Walking a Breast • What, Me? • Pavane for a Dead Princess (at IKEA) • Psalm 1.0 • Tit, with Cannabis • Planes Fly in Formation over the Backyard, as in War Movies • Latitudes • Boulder Sonnets, with Buddha and Ginsberg • Summer Theater • Colorado Ties for 6th Sunniest State • Nederland • Boulder Sonnet, with Buddha and Crickets • Psalm 2.0 • My Daughters among Dragonflies • I think in spirals; • Back/words: 1999 • Sweet World • 20 Little Lyric Essays (for Harold and Maude) • The History of the World Is a Palindrome • The Immortal #9 • Pavane for a Dead Princess (on Pluto) • The Astonished • Tit, with Foreplay • Tit, with Blue Guitar • The Integrity of Matter; or, Peace in the Rose-colored Now • The Integrity of Matter (A Footnote) • A Distillation of Matter • The Color of Oxygen • Avoiding Suicide: A Grandmother Poem • Notes on Ash Wednesday • First They Were • 12 Paintings from Hollis Sigler’s Breast Cancer Journal • The Last Prairie • Notes • Acknowledgments

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