Threshold Delivery by Patty Seyburn

I read Patty Seyburn’s Threshold Delivery in one sitting with both admiration and envy. I kept looking for a lame, even a mediocre poem, but (alas) (I mean thankfully!) found none. This is intimidating for fellow poets but absolutely fantastic for readers. Rather magically, Seyburn charts a poetic landscape that maps memory, the voices of her children, philosophical inquiry, the Talmud, and the persistent presence of death. Oh, and Mah Jongg. I remain in awe of her wit, both wry and sly as well as her sense of craft. Realistic yet revelatory, lyric yet lapidary, dark yet delightful, in the Charleston that is this life, I’d be happy to be passed Threshold Delivery in every hand. It is a remarkable book.

–Dean Rader

In Threshold Delivery, Patty Seyburn’s wit is gorgeously, ruthlessly inventive—death-harrowed and hope-shaded; it is deployed not for its own sake, but in the service of a moment when mortal truths break a poem, and us, wide open. “Shouldn’t we be able to take / one story with us? Not even / a pleasant one—just to know / who you were, where you stood? / If you never had a foyer, / you’d imagine it / more grand than it was:  really, it was just a threshold, a place / to arrive, pause, abandon.”  Seyburn writes against abandon. Her riveting attention fixes us here, in the fleeting world.

–Dorothy Barresi

Throughout Threshold Delivery, Seyburn writes honestly, at times comically, about her complex relationship with her late mother, seeking, along the way, a family lineage that is not, finally, traceable, lamenting that loss, too. These strong poems are informed as much by the specifics of a mother’s and daughter’s life–”what is memory without specifics”– as they are by the literary tradition out of which the poems arise and Jewish culture, practice, and thought, on whose wisdom and lore the poems draw as they try to make sense of what comes after life.

–Richard Chess