Finding My Way Home by Heidi Seaborn

“This poet brings us the sea, the flower bed, small things dying, a heart – all alive and kicking, Heidi Seaborn is a poet of verbs: ice keens, land shoulders an island, clamshells splay and split, things flap and stack; there are fields of flamboyant pink; gardens snap and silos crest –a heart taken out, pulses…this is a remarkable debut of a poet to keep watching. “

–Veronica Golos, author of ROOTWORK

In this first collection, Heidi Seaborn’s organizing trope is the dynamic play, in vivid imagery, of opposites:  from lost (the child-self absorbed in family secrets “written in disappearing ink,” the young woman “caught in a loveless marriage,” her brain “a sub-zero snarl”) to found in the process of illuminating a life. This governing metaphor is both Dantean and Wagoneresque—and in ‘The Poetry Workshop,” dedicated to the renowned Northwest School poet who invites his students “to get lost in the woods” of the imagination, Seaborn discovers her own way out into the clear.  This is a poet who, “when it is her turn to lead, takes us deeper still” with wit, seriousness and a “fine sense of direction” in these poems.

–Carolyne Wright, author of This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems and Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire

“When you encounter Heidi Seaborn’s Finding My Way Home, have someone read it to you. Close your eyes and listen. For, this is a poet who will envelope you in memories you didn’t even know you had. The poems in this collection thread together place, family, selfhood, and the power of language. Each verb gathers intensity: “I stirred up a hornets nest/shears jabbing into the brush.” Seaborn’s poems seek the felt, visceral world: a world where you weigh a heart in your hands, where you “fill pockets with shells” in order to make sense of it. This is a lush debut chapbook – as lush as the Pacific Northwest – and whether you want to or not, these poems will ask you to get lost to be found again.”

–Jane Wong, author of OVERPOUR, former Fulbright and Kundiman Fellow