Too Many Seeds by Gabrielle Myers

“Gabrielle Myers does not shy away from a kind of post-mod naturalism, where we can taste things, see things, and even – I dare say – touch their ‘opalescent crisp skin.’ Although world-stuff and social-stuff shifts and is disassembled in the scenic constructions of her poetics, she manages a lush 21^st century personal pointillism. Most lovely, most alluring.”

–Juan Felipe Herrera, former U.S. Poet Laurate (for the California Writers Exchange contest, Poets and Writers, 2009)

“Throughout this book, Gabrielle Myers reflects on ecology, environmental injustice, and multi-species relations. She invites us to touch “web threads,” smell compost, grip ripe fruit, and see hummingbirds extract “the last pollen from a yielding flower.” These poems are like seeds planted in our imaginations, which will root and blossom for many years to come. Reading, then, becomes a profound act of harvest.”

–Craig Santos Perez, author of Habitat Threshold and from unincorporated territory

“These poems of deep interiority and lush attention are a pleasure to read. This poet has fully metabolized and mastered many different styles and traditions, from Hopkins to Bukowski to Apollinaire. She writes, “My speech strengthens in a leaf/ Detached from what is real,” and her simultaneous detachment from what is merely real along with her deep connection to the natural world leads us further and closer to the essential, unanswerable questions that underly everything.”

–Matthew Zapruder, author of Father’s Day and Why Poetry

“This is a promising debut volume.  Myers has a keen eye for the natural world, and a particular gift for sound, especially the Anglo-Saxon alliterative dimension.”

–Alan Williamson, author of The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems (2004), Res Publica (1998), and Love and the Soul (1995).

“Feast your eyes and ears on the splendor of Gabrielle Myers’ collection: Too Many Seeds. A veritable cornucopia of richly textured language and imagery, these poems draw us deep into the fecund, visceral realms of the poet’s carefully observed terrain, and prove a tireless tribute to the natural world, places rife with thistle, grass, and vine, with bees and creeks and their “storm-heavy bends”, the “cricket chorus” and “chicken slumber”, “cabbage moth”, the “billions of bulbs” and “subterranean feelers”.  Clearly, Myers can’t have too many seeds because the fruits of her thoughtfully crafted lines defy death as they generously nourish us. In her own words: the growth goes on forever…”

–Michelle Bitting, author of Broken Kingdom (Catamaran Books) The Couple Who Fell to Earth (C & R Press), and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022)