Seed Celestial

by Sara R. Burnett

Overview

Seed Celestial is the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, selected by Eileen Myles; the poems in this debut collection consider societal issues, mythological origins, and the capacity for hope in the face of uncertain futures.  

 Bringing together contemporary issues of climate change, gun violence, immigration, and feminism, Sara R. Burnett writes haunting reflections on origins—of myth and memory, language and country, earth and mothers. While working from her own experience of raising children, she writes, 'You were inside my body / while I was outside; / outside was everything else.' Burnett vividly renders her own origin story as an immigrant’s daughter through the myth of Demeter and Persephone. 

This book is a love letter to the earth the way only a mother can write it: appreciating all its faults while seeing its beauty. Burnett offers a poetry collection that is tender and honest, akin to having an intimate conversation with a friend who tells us what we know to be true about ourselves, our twin capacities for love and violence, and what we don’t. She intertwines our violent, complicated world with the uncanny human capacity for hope and describes the awe of a world recreating itself again and again while wondering about all we lose and leave behind, especially for the next generation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781637680520
Publisher:	Autumn House Press
Publication date:	10/04/2022
Series:	Autumn House Press Poetry Prize
Pages:	92
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Sara R. Burnett is the author of Seed Celestial, winner of the 2021 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Mother Tongue, a poetry chapbook (Dancing Girl Press, 2018), and has published poems and essays in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Matter, PANK, and elsewhere. A finalist for the 2019 Enoch Pratt Free Library poetry award and a recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland and an MA in English Literature from the University of Vermont. She lives in Maryland with her husband and children. 

Table of Contents

I Seed

Ab Ovo 3

Theory of Probability I 4

Primary Source 5

Demeter's Remorse 7

Dancing in a Dark Room 8

Hemingway's Homes 9

II Animal

Endling 15

Fish (in) Tanks 17

Last Chance to Sec 18

Demeter's Wager 20

Body, a Field 22

Field, a Body 23

Abuelo Mío 24

American Robin 26

III Word

Pupusas at St. Camillus Church, Maryland 31

Mi Negrita 33

English II 34

Blur I 36

Blur II 37

Ethnic Arithmetic 38

Dear Shame, Dear Sludge 39

After Viewing Cassatt's Little Girl in a Blue Armchair without My Ex 41

Cherchez la Femme 43

IV Earth

Little Shadow 47

After Viewing Cassatt's The Oval Mirror with My Daughter Sleeping Next to Me 51

Letter to Another Mother with Excerpts from the Handbook on Mothering 53

Student Handbook 57

Demerer Remembering 58

What Was to Keep the Tigers at the Zoo 59

V Celestial

Why I No Longer Wear My Mother's Ring 65

Here and There a Thing That Glitters 67

Nest 69

Use Bottom Cushion for Flotation Device 71

After the Storm 73

El Regreso 74

Persephone Remembering 75

Theory of Probability II 76

Notes 79

Acknowledgments 80

Editorial Reviews

"Sara R. Burnett’s Seed Celestial is a quietly upending work. A book that’s often about maternity also includes the creation of the mother by the child. She’s comfortable with profundity, even conversational with it. 'I remembered / I had all eternity, / an empty glass to fill.' So the work is plain and beautiful and then surprising. She upends sentence structure to express family: 'Abuelo, there are moments when you’re in my head, / in evenings sometimes, my whole head, yours.' Her rhymes work like spice in cooking, understated here but always bringing it out, it being the varied, rough texture of life. By the time she drops the term endling ('when a species is the last of its kind'), I think that she might be an endling herself in that she’s taking this time with existence, inhabiting it as she does in her poems, as this is all there is." —Eileen Myles, author of Evolution

"Demeter, earth goddess and mother of Persephone, is the abiding presence of Seed Celestial, Sara R. Burnett’s quietly fierce, urgent, but also passionately affirmative exploration of the perilous joys of being both mother and daughter in the twenty-first century. Burnett’s clear-eyed and lyrical invocation of mothering as well as her poignant relationship with her Abuela, a Cuban exile, are deeply felt and lived." —Michael Collier, author of The Missing Mountain

"Sara R. Burnett’s debut full-length asks all the right questions: 'Who will she be when she’s grown? / Do I have time to shower?' What’s it like to be Demeter after the compromised end of Persephone’s story? How can we keep on taking care of one another as the sky falls, the water rises, extinctions close in on our world with its various blues? 'Mostly it’s that I can’t fly,' the poet muses, but there’s still so much that she can do: drawing on Anglo and on Cuban heritage, on mid-Atlantic and tropical flora and fauna, the poet finds a Lucretian feminism alert to change, disarmingly various, supple in its rhythms, able to listen and to respond. 'And the key? Didn’t I have it once?' Fans of Kasischke, of Meitner, and of tenderness take note: this poet is playing your song." —Stephanie Burt, author of Advice from the Lights

From the Publisher

"Burnett's Seed Celestial is a quietly upending work. A book that’s often about maternity also includes the creation of the mother by the child. She’s comfortable with profundity, even conversational with it. 'I remembered / I had all eternity, / an empty glass to fill.' So the work is plain and beautiful and then surprising. She upends sentence structure to express family: 'Abuelo, there are moments when you’re in my head, / in evenings sometimes, my whole head, yours.' Her rhymes work like spice in cooking, understated here but always bringing it out, it being the varied rough texture of life. By the time she drops the term ‘endling’ ('when a species is the last of its kind') I think that she might be an endling herself in that she’s taking this time with existence, inhabiting it as she does in her poems, as this is all there is. For Burnett, poems are like a staff upon which lives are stretched and dangled - lovingly & smart. It simply happens here. But to get that we must listen."

Eileen Myles

Demeter, earth goddess and mother of Persephone, is the abiding presence of Seed Celestial, Sara Burnett’s quietly fierce, urgent, but also passionately affirmative exploration of the perilous joys of being both mother and daughter in the twenty-first century. Burnett’s clear-eyed and lyrical invocation of mothering as well as her poignant relationship with her Abuela, a Cuban exile, are deeply felt and lived.

Michael Collier

"Burnett's debut full-length asks all the right questions: 'Who will she be when she's grown? / Do I have time to shower?' What's it like to be a Demeter after the compromised end of Persephone's story? How can we keep on taking care of one another as the sky falls, water rises, extinctions close in on our world with its various blues? 'Mostly it's that I can't fly,' the poet muses, but there's still so much that she can do: drawing on Anglo and on Cuban heritage, on mid-Atlantic and tropical flora and fauna, the poet finds a Lucretian feminism alert to change, disarmingly various, supple in its rhythms, able to listen and to respond. 'And the key? Didn't I have it once?' Fans of Kasischke, of Meitner, and of tenderness take note: this poet is playing your song."

Stephanie Burt