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Nepenthe Radiant by Aimee Seu

Nepenthe Radiant by Aimee Seu

Original price was: $17.99.Current price is: $15.99.

 

No one writes like Aimee Seu about the intoxicating ravishments of the “teething soul.”  Love child of John Keats and Siouxsie Sioux—or maybe of Rimbaud and Athena—or Sylvia Plath and Wim Wenders?—Seu plunges into the extravagant romance of oblivion with a linguistic audacity all her own, working the broken borders of the oneiric and the almost impossible consolations of the lyric “real.”  In Nepenthe Radiant, and perhaps especially in “October,” a long elegy for a lost lover (“one spirit / in two bodies”), Seu confirms with comet-like intensity her place among our best poets of the excruciating, ecstatic crucible of becoming.   
–Lisa Russ Spaar, Author of MADRIGALIA:  NEW & SELECTED POEMS and PARADISE CLOSE:  A NOVEL
 
“In Nepenthe Radiant, Aimee Seu sings a rich litany cranked into anguished eloquence as memory and imagination celebrate and try to restore ‘the rare life that can only exist/in the conditions of such collision…’ She prowls her youth and takes us (grateful and dazzled) along for the ride.”
–Gregory Orr,  Author of Concerning the Book that Is the Body of the Beloved & Poetry as Survival 
 
“Sensual and wide awake, the poems in Aimee Seu‘s Nepenthe Radiant return us to that place where personal and communal mythology face a head on collision with harsh reality, a disaster area where ‘the crash site yearns for the crash.’ Unapologetic and generous, even at their most elegiac, these poems carry an affirming richness meant less to compensate for than to assuage and articulate the inevitable pain of love and loss. Nepenthe Radiant is, simply put, an astonishing collection by one of our very best poets.”
–James Kimbrell, author of The Law of Truly Large Numbers. 
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Nepenthe Radiant

by Aimee Seu

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This title will be released on June 27, 2025

The nepenthe is a mythical drug that quells all worry, grief and pain. Aimee Seu returns after her battering ram of a first collection, Velvet Hounds (winner of the 2020 Akron Poetry Prize), to spellbind once again. In Nepenthe Radiant, we pass into a world where there are symphonies in every silence, peace where we expect cacophony and nightmare in the silken fold of a kiss. Here, torment and bliss intermingle in one potent and addictive tincture. “I am now a part of the living’s selfish need to depict the dead in heaven,” Seu writes. Yet, the grand distances of these narratives span farther—shadowed underworlds, lost possible universes, spinning dreamscapes,  nearly-unspeakable loneliness. Seu’s biracial, pansexual poetics examine poverty, addiction, violence and mental illness with tenderness and moxy. Sapphic ceremonials, elegies for wayward teenage heroes, the ransacked temple of youth, ecstasies of a tumultuous, obsessive romance, all unravel before us in the blazing hallucinogenics of Seu’s rich and urgent rendering. Reader, fall into the siren echoes of these pages, their one moment raucous and swollen, then barrenly low tides. Get lost inside heartbreak’s “kaleidoscopic, continuous bloom.” Gaze into the “stained glass cornea” of the beloved.

Aimee Seu is the author of Velvet Hounds, winner of the 2020 Akron Poetry Prize. She graduated from the University of Virginia Poetry MFA and was recipient of Academy of American Poetry Prizes at UVA and Temple University. Her poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Poets, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, BOAAT, Redivider, Raleigh Review, Diode, Leavings, Minnesota Review, among others . She’s currently studying in Florida State University’s Creative Writing PhD program.  

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