The Sky Is an Elephant is part imaginary playmate, part near-death high jinks, and part love song from the body to the soul and back again. “Where I once spoke flute, I now speak arpeggio, now fugue, now biopsy.” It’s a shaggy dog story, a story within a story, maybe even a koan. A little humor, a little Zagajewski. Finally, it’s in homage to poets Jack Spicer and Federico García Lorca, who played with the greathearted gift of poetry until the day they died. And after.

Praise for The Sky Is an Elephant

Maureen Seaton’s The Sky Is an Elephant is a masterful parting song of wit, bravery, honesty and lush language. Her liminal voice is one of continual discovery and awe—(I am not just a body but a body engaged in the physics of dying that can slip in & out of different realities to experience “somewhere else,” no problem…) She contemplates science, the universe, our fractured America/her fractured spine, and all kinds of muses and influences. Seaton’s humor is also on full display in poems like “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead” and “I Loved Lucy.” But bring your hankie along with your bookmark because even when you are laughing, lines like these will sneak up on you......life waves to me from the mountaintops. Goodbye, life says, I will miss your beautiful hair.

–Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story

 

Maureen Seaton’s latest book, The Sky is an Elephant, is a luminous and atomic collection of poems that enter the ear and circulate throughout the body. They are worlds made out of light and magic, of pain and terror, of joy and desire, of humor and anger. Each poem is an inherent something or other floating above you and inside of you. They soar 39,000 feet above the Azores and then crash into you. If you lean in close enough, yes, get as close as you can, you will hear Seaton’s heartbeat, breaks, tumbles and linguistic twirls. The soul of this book (yes, soul I say) is a breath of alleluia and oh my. When you cross the bridge into this collection, amidst quarks and complexity, wobble forth into the darkness with the physicist on one arm and Maureen on the other. They’ll guide you through an anomaly of stars like the smoothest operator of them all.

–Neil de la Flor, author of The Ars Magna for the Manifold Dimensions of z

 

Maureen Seaton courageously traverses the liminal realm between life and death with poems that interplay between world weaving and surrendering to the limitations of the physical body. Seaton stands on the bridge between “the devil and the deep” and carves out a universe of her own invention. In this world, light bows, breaks, and rises in the oven. A crab is an apple, a ghost, a nebula, an astrological home. This collection is an invitation to play in this precarious space as we move with the poet on her elegantly crafted carousel. These poems are both beautiful and wretched as they lovingly provide the reader with a compass to confront dying.  Shapeshifting between Seastar and wailing song, The Sky is an Elephant considers the beauty, impossibility, and unreasonableness of life while illuminating “a window through which to love it.”

–Chioma Urama, author of A Body of Water