GAUDY SORROW – MEMOIR by Barbara Seyda

Gaudy Sorrow is a kaleidoscopic tapestry that spirals the reader into a personal journey-rant of rich textures. Barbara Seyda’s tender probing, in-your-face, funny, raw swirl through grief, grasping, and wonder is a careening mouthful of orgasmic words placed just so. Reading Gaudy Sorrow should not be rushed, but savored the way a 19th century naturalist would explore her first jungle canopy. The way one would “floss teeth with trumpet vines,” as Seyda says. This jewel of a journey is thrilling, violent, confessional, and beautiful; we want to go with Seyda as she “drives though LA with a megaphone clamped to the top of a stolen Volkswagen bug. Blasting a non-stop transient grief monologue.” I am grateful for this rant and will continue to revisit it over and over again.

–Shelly Hubman, Writer, Intuitive Healer

Barbara Seyda’s searing tale of sex, love, and grief is like a glimmering sequined dress—one minute we’re dancing wildly and aglow; the next we’re stripped bare, lying in a heap on the floor, waiting for morning sunlight. This, after all, is a chronicle of human intimacy, a place only those willing to face blood and balm dare to go. With its breathy, exquisite prose and cutting candor, Gaudy Sorrow left me sweating, gasping, and fully alive.

–Kimi Eisele, The Lightest Object in the Universe

Sylvia Plath warned that ‘poetry, at its best, can do you a lot of harm’ and maybe that’s why I return to it. The same can be said for loving. Which is to say living is truly treacherous work. Make no mistake about it, you dirty human miracle, Barbara Seyda’s GAUDY SORROW will hurt you. It will tie you up.  Hurl you into a carnival of ruin with a locked-up staggering beast.  Then slap you for not saying fuck you. Here, glue-gunning our fingers together becomes an expression of gratitude; this is poetry for the un-furred, the grief-scored. Don’t miss your chance to stare straight into the eclipse, you who are a private bomb with a heart.

–TC Tolbert, The Quiet Practices, Gephyromania

Meet Barbara Seyda

Interview: https://canvasrebel.com/meet-barbara-seyda/