Blue Opening

Through accounts of chronic illness, generational trauma, and holding out hope for the future, the yearning third volume from Sebree (Field Study) traces a desire to understand one’s origins. Moving from histories of hereditary disease to questions surrounding the creation of the universe, these poems wrestle with the cosmic without losing sight of the personal. “I feel furthest from where I’ve come/ when womb wreckage comes in clumps—” begins an early entry titled “Hiraeth” (Welsh for a mournful kind of longing for home) about the speaker’s inherited menorrhagia, which serves as a painful link to her own beginnings while also setting up her desire for a child. The creative act becomes a way for the speaker to hold off death and decay through a focus on perpetual renewal: “In poems, I return to water like a baptismal font. Here, I can Big Bang myself—begin again ad nauseam.” A highlight of the final section is a crown of sonnets addressed to an unborn child, imagining motherhood as chance to break cycles of generational trauma and raise the child in an Edenic environment: “In our garden,/ you will choose from which trees to eat—.” Wistful yet undaunted, this collection forges new beginnings out of elegy. (Sept.)