Beyond Cornfields by Elaine M. Seaman

Beyond Cornfields is alive with backroad byways, birds, Pepsi and peanuts, and patchwork landscapes. Seaman begins by saying that everything that would come later spun out from the center of Iowa and her clear-as-day Iowan voice drops sparks of wry humor as deftly as it alludes to grief, made all the more poignant for its spareness. From the family home in Iowa Seaman spins us outward to Michigan, west to Colorado, past sandhill cranes writing across the broad sky, then farther still to Hawai’i, Mexico, and New Zealand, where she puzzles over a recipe calling for “blue milk.” But always there is the return home, where life doesn’t have to go far to be a life. I urge you to settle in and read this volume straight through. Allow Seaman’s poems to offer you tender comfort as, again and again, she shows you how the world bumps beauty right in front of your eyes.

–Marion Starling Boyer, winner of the 2021 Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize for Ice Hours and Grayson Books 2023 Chapbook Prize for What Word for This.

In Elaine Seaman’s poem Centrifuge, she writes, “Everything that would come later/spun out from the center of Iowa…”. And so it is with this collection, grounded between cornfields in Iowa but taking literal flight to new worlds where her sons have settled. Drives, cruises, flights, she finds herself between the comfort and ghosts of the past and the quickly accelerating present, new geographies and adult children. Plain-spoken but not terse, Seaman wonders successfully about her shifting world.

–Elizabeth Kerlikowske, Author of The Vaudeville Horse, Art Speaks, and Dominant Hand

Elaine Seaman’s Beyond Cornfields is a must-have guide for anyone who has ever travelled, left loved ones behind, or found themselves left behind. A poet who is also a quilter, Seaman has expertly pieced together tender and fierce poems that take the reader on a vibrant journey through Iowa cornfields to New Zealand gardens, from a dinner cruise where a stranger chokes on a steak to playing extreme croquet in Kalamazoo. Seaman’s delightful collection is testament to the power of poetry, stitching together memories that open to the vast landscape of the heart.
–Jennifer Clark, author of A Beginner’s Guide to Heaven and Kissing the World Goodbye