Maureen Seaton

Tilt / Beautiful People brings to life two innovative poetry books integrated into one. In Tilt, Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton (1947-2023) write through climate change, Maureen’s illness, and the pandemic with their signature wit and poignancy. Their feminist curiosity leads them to poems about gender identity, marriage equality, and the complexities of national politics. Assembled shortly before Maureen’s death, the poems in Tilt tell the story of a friendship rooted in collaborative artistic play. The title of the book gives a nod to the earth’s tilt, which gives us seasons, but also hints that the poems were written at full tilt, these poets hyperaware they only had so much time left to write with one another. Beautiful People was written back and forth over the course of several months by poets Maureen Seaton and Aaron Smith. Bold and inventive, it moves from sonnets and sestinas to prose poems and so much more. While its center is a love for poetry and art and laughter, the poets also grapple with mortality, sadness, and what it means to be alive on a broken but beautiful planet. Through their literary friendship, they put a mirror to all our lovely faces.

Tilt / Beautiful People brings to life two innovative poetry books integrated into one. In Tilt, Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton (1947-2023) write through climate change, Maureen’s illness, and the pandemic with their signature wit and poignancy. Their feminist curiosity leads them to poems about gender identity, marriage equality, and the complexities of national politics. Assembled shortly before Maureen’s death, the poems in Tilt tell the story of a friendship rooted in collaborative artistic play. The title of the book gives a nod to the earth’s tilt, which gives us seasons, but also hints that the poems were written at full tilt, these poets hyperaware they only had so much time left to write with one another.Beautiful People was written back and forth over the course of several months by poets Maureen Seaton and Aaron Smith. Bold and inventive, it moves from sonnets and sestinas to prose poems and so much more. While its center is a love for poetry and art and laughter, the poets also grapple with mortality, sadness, and what it means to be alive on a broken but beautiful planet. Through their literary friendship, they put a mirror to all our lovely faces.

Undersea is Seaton's free-wheeling series of love notes to her transplanted sea-struck self and her salty poems that celebrate her signature wit and joy in that wild state of mind, Florida. These are poems of family, love, and longing for life itself. Undersea is a novella in poems.Told with her singular wit and wisdom honed by salt and sun and brine, the poems are besotted with Florida-its superhero pelicans, the rum-macerated retirees baking in the sun, the soundtrack of air-conditioning, and a lover's night terrors playing in an oceanside efficiency. The speaker in these poems is love-laden but clear-eyed, sure that "there is no line between water and sky," the perfect "stark raving" guide for the reader eager to "...proceed until the edge of the cave / or run out of air, whichever comes first."-Caridad Moro-Gronlier, author of Tortillera Reading Maureen Seaton's poems has always been a kind of astral projection for me. Reading Undersea, I was flung loose from my body so many times, sailing across the Sunshine State on a cloud of sensuous imagery. In Seaton's rendering of this land we love, "Avocados/fall like big and little bombs," "egrets grow fat on curly fries," and "there is no line between water and sky." Come for the "gibbous moonlight," the "canny pelicans," a "speedboat full of gangsters." Stay for the long-won wisdom of the poet herself, who hearkens Blake's imperative to "see the world in a grain of sand"-literally and figuratively, too. Seaton is the glass and the salt, the sling and the shot, "the blue ineffable" that lingers beyond her most luminous feats of language.⠀-Julie Marie Wade, author of Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing and Six: Poems

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.

Sex Talks to Girls chronicles the outward antics of a woman on an inward journey to self through the routes of religion, sex, sobriety, and kids. Recasting herself in this memoir as ""Molly Meek,"" Maureen Seaton interprets the emergence of Molly's identity in luxurious and very funny prose.Molly alternately finds herself in the surprising company of winos, swingers, and drag kings; in love with Jesus H. Christ and a butch named Mars; in charge of two children; writing stories that shrink painfully to poems without her permission; and incapable of figuring out how she landed in any of these predicaments. She is, by turns, a little saint, a Stepford wife, a bi-mom, and a femme with super powers. Her transformation?from near-nun to full-fledged sexual being, accidentally becoming conscious in the process and delighting in the spree?is the story of a life set on play and a woman heroically committed to seeing it through.

The JackLeg Press Poetry SeriesStorming the genders of Americanismo with crossed fingers and sans rules, these poems contradict the text by adding values and filling out applications. Two voices and three voices are threaded to one and the resulting operatic tool digs up the shades of birds, mathematics, riots, and catastrophe.Experience a disturbing disintegration of authorial identity. Experience that identity reshape and reassemble as an intelligent chimera that stares you in the face with as many faces as you can imagine. - Natalija Grgorinic & Ognjen RadenWhen I interviewed these three authors about how they "did" it, that is to say, collaborate, it wasn't like I received three sets of answers. Group mind groped, it was like talking to the tank. - Terese SvobodaCover art: Pamela Callahan, "West Nile Kid." (Courtesy of the artist and Woman Made Gallery, Chicago

Sex Talks to Girls chronicles the outward antics of a woman on an inward journey to self through the routes of religion, sex, sobriety, and kids. Recasting herself in this memoir as 'Molly Meek,' Maureen Seaton interprets the emergence of Molly's identity in luxurious and very funny prose.Molly alternately finds herself in the surprising company of winos, swingers, and drag kings; in love with Jesus H. Christ and a butch named Mars; in charge of two children; writing stories that shrink painfully to poems without her permission; and incapable of figuring out how she landed in any of these predicaments. She is, by turns, a little saint, a Stepford wife, a bi-mom, and a femme with super powers. Her transformation - from near-nun to full-fledged sexual being, accidentally becoming conscious in the process and delighting in the spree - is the story of a life set on play and a woman heroically committed to seeing it through.