Dear Seth

by Heather Christle

In Dear Seth, Heather Christle departs from her usual style, instead opting for a more directly autobiographical approach with a series of poem-letters to the poet Seth Landman. "There is fear the baby / when it arrives will be wrongly / or poorly loved," she writes, and "We are in the new year now / hello / In the last days of the old one," each poem a glimpse of lives changing. Heather Christle is the author of The Difficult Farm; The Trees The Trees, which won the Believer Poetry Award; and What Is Amazing.

Genres: Poetry

19 pages, Chapbook

First published February 27, 2014

About the author

Heather Christle is the author of The Crying Book (Catapult), a NYT Editor’s Choice, Indie Next Selection, and national bestseller that was translated into eight languages, awarded the Georgia Book Award for memoir, and adapted for radio by the BBC. An Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta, Christle is also the author of four poetry collections including The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books), which won the Believer Book Award and was adapted into a ballet by the Pacific Northwest Ballet. In 2021 she was the recipient of a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in nonfiction. Born in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire to a Merchant Mariner from North Dakota and an artist from London, Christle spent her teen years and early twenties immersed in the Boston punk scene. She attended Tufts University, graduating in 2004. After receiving her MFA from UMass Amherst in 2009, she was a Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University from 2009-11, and has also taught at UT Austin and Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her partner (poet and writer Christopher DeWeese), their child, and two cats.

Reviews

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this chapbook. They are epistolary poems to someone called Seth. I have it on my phone and keep reading it over again. It's intriguing and so much of its power is in what is not said, the gaps in their relationship that you attempt to fill with a back story.

[Amelia Marshall · Rating 4 out of 5]

A charming collection. Some of Heather Christle's most honest and beautiful poems.