Winner of the 2008 Green Rose Prize in Poetry

“In a time when there’s little to laugh about, Patty Seyburn’s Hilarity is an epic punch line: sparkling and smart. I rely on her ‘sort of music eliding joy and pain’ —and the echoes in the great church of disbelief to keep us all sane and savvy. Read Hilarity and weep, and laugh. And get better because of it.”

      —Carol Muske-Dukes

“Patty Seyburn’s Hilarity is a skeptic’s playground, in which we learn that Dante ‘layered Hell like a taco salad,’ that God created the ocean with waves ‘in tiers’ instead of vertical, and an escaping butterfly triggers the rhyme of ‘reason’ with ‘treason.’ Seyburn is also mistress of nocturnal phantasmagoria, in a series of insomnia and dream and nightmare poems that dredge ‘the silt and mud of memory.’ Is she also, however, a closet romantic? You will have to read the seven poker-faced ‘chapters’ of the title poem to find out.”

      —Alicia Ostriker

Praise for Diasporadic:

“What distinguishes Patty Seyburn’s first volume of poetry, Diasporadic, is her magic habit of managing disparate but simultaneous perspectives. Almost yoga-like, she seems able to train her focus at once on big subjects and small details, as if she had a different capacity for perspective than the rest of us.”

      —Molly Peacock

“ . . . this impressive debut volume introduces a poet of remarkable versatility and intelligence: Seyburn’s gentle wit and winning persona find inspiration in family history; her narratives and lyrics, with their varying lines, draw on her sense of Jewish identity and difference, whether as an assimilated Midwestern girl, or in the voices of some lost women from the Bible.”

      —Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Mechanical Cluster:

“The poems of Patty Seyburn are filled with a strange, ambitious, and compelling music made of the mythic, momentous, and mundane days of our lives. The poems arise fro the gold sun and the surf of California, the skies filled with western birds, but the poet finds illumination also in the ‘grid of lights and land / known as Detroit.’ This is a remarkable book.”

      —David Citino

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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