CANR

• The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 2016
• Ordinary Beast: Poems Ecco (New York, NY), 2017

1. Ordinary beast : poems LCCN 2017036984 Type of material Book Personal name Sealey, Nicole, author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Ordinary beast : poems / Nicole Sealey. Edition First Ecco hardcover edition. Published/Produced New York, NY : Ecco, 2017. Projected pub date 1709 Description pages cm ISBN 9780062688804 (hardback) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2. The animal after whom other animals are named : poems LCCN 2015031418 Type of material Book Personal name Sealey, Nicole, author. Main title The animal after whom other animals are named : poems / Nicole Sealey. Published/Produced Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, [2016] Description 24 pages ; 18 cm. ISBN 9780810133129 (pbk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3619.E25515 A84 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Nicole Sealey Website - http://nicolesealey.com/

  Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors include an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, MacDowell Colony and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming to Best American Poetry 2018, The New Yorker, The New York Times and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the executive director at Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

• Mosaic - https://mosaicmagazine.org/nicole-sealey-interview/#.Wn_KyryWZpg

  October 19, 2017 by Mosaic Magazine
  NICOLE SEALEY: INTERVIEW
  Before you begin this excellent conversation between Nicole Sealey and Kyla Marshell, please support our Kickstarter. Funds will support the upcoming Black Documents: Mosaic Literary Conference.

  by Kyla Marshell

  Throughout Nicole Sealey’s debut poetry collection, Ordinary Beast, there’s an idea that repeats and reverberates: death. The inevitability of our collective demise—and all the beauty we make “with our brief animation” (“Object Permanence”)—is the impulse that animates these poems. “Give me tonight to be inconsolable,/so the death drive does not declare//itself, so the moonlight does not convince/sunrise” she writes in “Imagine Sisyphus Happy.” Yet despite the air of mortality that hovers about each poem, there are also these: humor (death’s better half), and unabashed, unself-conscious love. These are life’s inevitabilities, assurances, joys—and the spark for countless poems throughout time. With her own distinct voice, Sealey joins a lineage of poets who ask, What does it mean to be alive?

  My former coworker/boss/workshop peer and I exchanged questions and answers via email.

  Kyla Marshell: Congrats on the publication of Ordinary Beast! Does it feel like it’s been a long time coming?
  Nicole Sealey: Thanks, Kyla! You know, it actually doesn’t feel like it’s been a long time coming. It feels like everything is happening as it should, when it should. I’ve been writing poems for more than a decade, but hadn’t committed fully until six or seven years ago. And, honestly, before Halloween of last year, I didn’t even have a completed manuscript for editors to consider, much less publish. My chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, wasn’t out a year when I signed the contract for Ordinary Beast.

  I’d been talking with Dan Halpern, publisher and president of Ecco, for months, but hadn’t assumed Ecco’s interest. It wasn’t until early November, when, over dinner, after Dan read the finished manuscript, he said outright, “I want to publish your book,” that I realized what was happening. Though we’d been in touch for damn near a year about my work, I was still very surprised. Dan, with so much warmth, said, “Of course—what did you think?” It was a sweet and humbling moment. Which is to say, I feel lucky to have an opportunity that I probably don’t deserve, but that the gods saw fit to gift.

  Nicole Sealey. Photo credit: Marcia Wilson/Widevision Photography

  KM: That’s so surprising to hear. What triggered your decision to commit to poetry more fully?
  NS: I began thinking about poems that I hadn’t yet written, but wanted to write, and became quite sad. What if I never write these poems?

  I was working a full-time job at the time and had been doing so for nearly eight years. In those eight years, I wrote some, but didn’t finish much. Not that one can’t have a full-time job and write steadily (people do it all the time!), I, however, wasn’t yet one of those people. Poetry was still very new to me and required an insight only a complete immersion could provide. So, immerse I did. I left my job and formally began studying poetry for the next two years at NYU. It was one of the hardest, most risky decisions I’d ever made but, I see now, my happiness depended on it.

  KM: What range of time do these poems cover?
  NS: The earliest poems date back to 2005 or 2006 and the most recent were written earlier this year, but all the ideas and images were cultivated over time. I can hold on to ideas, images as well as lines for years until opportunities for exploration or inclusion present themselves. And, of course, subconsciously, while living, I’m gathering material that I trust the future-, slightly-smarter, more-mature me might be able to treat.

  I still have a question or two about images in Ordinary Beast. “It’s Not Fitness, It’s a Lifestyle,” for example. Even now, with the “finished” book in my hands, I’m still debating whether I should specify the bird in the poem by its common name or be vague. As it reads now, the bird is just a “bird” flying around inside an airport. For sound and specificity, should it be a sparrow? Can specificity work, considering the bird is flying so fast “I can’t/make out its wings”? If I can’t make out its wings, how can I make out type?

  With all this in mind, more accurately, the range of time these poems span is 1979 to well-into-the-future.

  KM: There’s a lot of attention paid to first books. What message did you want to send with this one?
  NS: Not to sound dramatic, but first books introduce debut authors to the world. First books are first impressions and, of course, I want to make a good one, which, to me, demands that I write the best poems I’m capable of writing. With Ordinary Beast, it wasn’t so much a message I wanted to send, as it was an offering I wished to give. As such, these poems aren’t trying to teach readers but, rather, communicate with them. The speakers in “Candelabra with Heads” and “In Defense of ‘Candelabra with Heads,’” for example, directly engage readers in conversation, while other poems in the collection make statements, as one would during conversation, to prompt a back-and-forth.

  KM: How did you come to writing in form, and why do you use it?
  NS: I came to form through that Cave Canem workshop taught by the great formalist Marilyn Nelson that both you and I participated in eight years ago. Before that, I dabbled, but would never really come back to poems written in a form other than free verse—I’d get frustrated immediately and throw in the towel shortly thereafter. From that workshop, I learned that I could stand to be more patient with and diligent in my work.

  I use form because it requires that I be my most deliberate, which is something I aspire to in my work and in my life. The traditional sonnet, with its fourteen ten-beat lines and rigid rhyme scheme, can encourage even the most tangential poets to cut to the chase.

  KM: You’ve said before that you write poems very slowly. Can you describe, in detail, how you write a poem?
  NS: Yeah, I definitely write slowly. I write line by line—if a line isn’t right, I don’t (can’t?) move on until it is. This probably isn’t ideal, but it has worked for me.

  I approach every poem differently, as each poem requires something different of me. “Heretofore Unuttered,” for instance, opens with lines from an abandoned poem I’d written at least a couple years prior. I was so taken with these lines that I’d just stare at them for hours. It wasn’t until I bought an orchid to pretty my office that the poem began to come alive.

  As if god, despite his compulsions, were decent
  and hadn’t the tendency to throw off
  all appearance of decorum, here I am
  admiring this single violet orchid.
  How lucky am I to go unnoticed
  or so I imagine, when, at this writing,
  there is a red-tailed hawk, somewhere,
  tracking the soft shrills of newborn songbirds.

  “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You’” took me a little more than two years to draft. Months were spent scouring hundreds of poetry collections for lines. After which, I began piecing a puzzle, which had no fixed pieces, together. Dozens of papers with dozens of lines by dozens of poets were spread across my dining room table and floor for the better half of 2016. I experimented with combinations of lines until combinations were exhausted and did so with each section of the cento, of which there are twelve. On top of that, I imposed my own rules. The cento had to be comprised of 100 different lines by 100 ethnically diverse poets, of which at least 50% had to identify as women.

  KM: I love the cento, and how, despite being comprised of others’ work, it still sounds very much like you.
  NS: Thank you—that’s what I was going for. I was concerned that the cento might read like disparate voices vying for a place, so I was very careful about the selection and arrangement of lines, and equally careful about the arrangement of each section and the poem’s placement in the book itself. It took me some time, too, to understand that each line couldn’t function on the same level. As much as I wanted to include all heavy-hitting lines, some lines had to serve a less conspicuous purpose, getting the poem from point A to point B for example.

  KM: I was so glad to see your Brad Pitt poem, “An Apology for Trashing Magazines in Which You Appear” in the collection. 1) How did that poem come about? and 2) How, in selecting and ordering poems in this collection, did you balance the multiple tones—dark, morose, wry, comic?
  NS: That poem was actually inspired by Denise Duhamel’s sestina to Sean Penn, entitled “Delta Flight 659,” in which all the end words of each line are variations on “Penn.” I thought the idea was brilliant and decided to try my hand at it. I chose Brad Pitt because I had the biggest crush on him when I was a teenager and, like “Penn,” “Pitt” lends itself to playful variations.

  There were definitely expectations each poem needed to meet, respectively, to be included in the collection—though I knew those expectations only after they had been met. I want to say that the poems had to be as good as or better than my favorite poem in the collection, which I won’t name. In terms of the order, my process was mostly associative, linking ideas or images to the next. And, of course, I enlisted the help of my husband, who has a talent for all things poetry.

  KM: You have a wonderful series of poems titled “Legendary” about the stars of the film Paris Is Burning. What is it about Pepper LaBeija, Venus Xtravaganza, and the others, that you connect with?
  NS: I kid you not, I’ve seen Paris Is Burning (in part or entirely) at least 200 times. I connect with the stars of the documentary film because they epitomize everything I want to be: talented, brilliant, self-assured, driven, kind, quick-witted and beautiful. That they were all these things in spite of their systematic oppression is a testament to the supportive communities to which they belonged and their individual characters.

  Also, believe it or not, I was my high school’s homecoming queen and ran for Ms. Kappa Alpha Psi in college (I came in third), so the pomp and circumstance of it all pulled me in.

  KM: Both your chapbook and full-length collection reference “animals” or “beasts.” Is there something inherently wild to you about our human existence?
  NS: All of it is wild—that we happen to walk upright, wear clothes and communicate with language doesn’t make the human experience any less wild. The idea that we are incapable of wilding is itself anthropocentric, especially when we so often disprove this theory. What’s wild is how super-sophisticated man believes himself to be, even while treating others and the environment badly.

  KM: What, for you, is the connection between death and love?
  NS: They’re both inevitable. Do you remember who said that there are only two things certain in life: death and taxes? …I would add love to that list of certainties.

  KM: In your observations of living things, do you naturally see that potential (or inevitability) for death?
  NS: Yes. The poet Ross Gay once said, “we’re watching each other die slowly.” That statement is profoundly true, as we’re literally witness to the slow deaths (or long lives?) of one another—whether it be by time or disease, both of which ravage the body and mind. But the fact that death exists and is inevitable doesn’t negate the fact that we live and love. Life and death exist at once.

  Kyla Marshell’s work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Gawker, The Guardian, O, the Oprah Magazine, among others. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a Jacob K. Javits fellowship. She is a graduate of Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College, where she earned her MFA.

• Brooklyn Rail - https://brooklynrail.org/2017/12/books/ORDINARY-BEAST-NICOLE-SEALEY-with-Alex-Dueben

  DECEMBER 21ST, 2017
  More Articles...
  Print
  Facebook
  Twitter
  WEBEXCLUSIVE
  Ordinary Beast:
  NICOLE SEALEY with Alex Dueben

  Nicole Sealey
  Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017)

  Nicole Sealey had an eventful 2017. Ordinary Beast, her debut collection of poetry, was published by Ecco in September, which caps off a year that began when she took the helm as the executive director of Cave Canem in January. Cave Canem, which just turned twenty, has been one of the most important literary organizations of recent decades. The group’s list of former fellows include some of the country’s great poets. Sealey is a former fellow who plans to continue and expand their efforts through anti-oppression workshops and nurturing a new generation of poets and arts administrators.

  Ordinary Beast combines formal verse and free verse. The longest poem in the book, and one of its key poems is cento for the night i said, “i love you” but she writes poems about Brad Pitt and Clue, about Thomas Hischhorn’s Candelabra with Heads, and Paris Is Burning, about love and history. It is a stunning debut book, full of beauty and rage, a sense of history and spirituality. The book is moving and powerful and marks the arrival of a major poetic voice. Sealey was kind enough to talk about the book and Cave Canem

  Alex Dueben (Rail): I was reading an interview where you described yourself as a slow writer. What does that mean to you?

  Nicole Sealey: I know poets who are able to write good poems in a day or two—I envy those poets. In my 38 years, that has happened for me only once. I believe “unframed” came to me in a day. Depending on the poem, it can take me anywhere from a couple of months to a few years, from start to finish. But this isn’t unique to my experience as a poet. There are many others who write as slowly or even slower than I do. From poet to poet, processes and priorities are different. I, for example, have a 9 to 5 job, so there’s also actual time to contend with.

  Rail: Reading the book the poem that I’m guessing took the longest to write was “cento for the night i said, ‘i love you’”. Not just because of its length but can you talk about what a cento is?

  Sealey: A cento, as you’ve come to know, is a poem comprised entirely of lines by other poets. A few summers ago, I had the pleasure of studying under poet Alan Shapiro at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. I brought in an eight-line cento to workshop – what would later become a section of “cento for the night”. Shapiro said something like, “you know a cento is usually a hundred lines long, right?” I took that as a challenge and so began the expansion of my cento. Before I began drafting “cento for the night”, I knew that it should be comprised of lines by 100 different poets. Of those poets, no more than fifty percent could be white and no more than fifty percent could be men.

  I mined my library. Selected hundreds of lines. Then wrote those lines out by hand on loose-leaf. Dozens of papers with dozens of lines lined my dining room table—for at least a year my husband and I ate elsewhere in the house. [laughs] I don’t know what I was thinking. What possessed me. Midway through I thought to myself, why did I do this? It took me damn near a year and a half, maybe even two, to organize the cento. But, by the project’s end, something beautiful had been created and I couldn’t have been more proud.

  Rail: The formal structure is a time-consuming challenge, but the poem also sounds like you, like your other poems in the book, and I would imagine that’s the biggest challenge.

  Sealey: You know, that wasn’t as difficult as you might think. The lines I selected were ones that moved me, ones that I was aesthetically drawn to—perhaps even lines that I wished I would’ve written myself. As standalone lines, each probably reads like the work of another poet, which is to be expected. Taken all together, however, I believe they read like me or a version thereof.

  I wasn’t necessarily searching for lines that sounded like me because I knew that, in the end, they’d begin to collectively form a voice I could call my own. I was mainly concerned with the arrangement of the lines more than anything else.

  Rail: You have free verse poems and also sestinas and sonnets. What’s your relationship to formal verse?

  Sealey: I started thinking seriously about poetry because of received form. I had the great fortune of participating in a Cave Canem workshop led by Marilyn Nelson, an amazing formalist. Before then, I used to begin poems in form and then abandon them soon after out of sheer frustration. All that to say, my relationship with form, at least initially, was very much strained. Now, I love form because it forces me to be deliberate—it encourages the most circuitous poets to get to the point.

  Nicole Sealey
  Form is a way into and out of poems that require repetition, rhyme, meter or any number of other accoutrements.

  Rail: The book is very dark but it’s also very playful.

  Sealey: I’m glad you think so! I wanted Ordinary Beast to reflect the complexity of the human experience, which includes both darkness and delight.

  Rail: Just as you’re balancing free verse and form, you’re also balancing light and dark elements and the book has this associative quality that brings them all together.

  Sealey: Well, thank you, that’s kind of you to say. That associative quality, I think, comes from my work with form. The restrictions lend themselves to music, imagery and associations that probably wouldn’t occur otherwise. The challenge of getting from point A to B in a fixed number of beats or the challenge of rhyming one word with another and the poem still making poetic sense, for me, creates a heightened sense of imaginative urgency that informs interaction with my free verse poems. That’s how, I imagine, a poem like “the first person who will live to be one hundred and fifty years old has already been born” is able to leap from a conversation about getting older to the Mona Lisa.

  Rail: In the Clue poems, the Brad Pitt poem, you take these topics that seem playful and turn them into something more, and one way you do that is through form.

  Sealey: Before seeing the poem Denise Duhamel wrote for Sean Penn, “Delta Flight 659,” which “an apology for trashing magazines in which you appear,” better known as the “Brad Pitt poem,” uses as its model, I didn’t know how to best articulate the poem. I’d had the poem in mind for years, but hadn’t found a way in until I read Duhamel’s. The Brad Pitt poem is my attempt at an amusing exploration of envy, self-loathing, and celebrity culture and, had it not been for Duhamel’s form, I’m convinced that that poem would not exist. That goes for the other poems in the collection written in received form as well, from the “legendary” sonnets to the erasure.

  Rail: You have two pairs of poems in conversation with each other I wanted to talk about. One pair is “candelabra with heads” and “in defense of candelabra with heads”. The first poem was written about the Thomas Hirschhorn piece of the same name. Why did you write the second one?

  Sealey: It wasn’t a conscious decision but, rather, an impulse I gave in to. I had to write “candelabra with heads,” the ekphrastic poem inspired by the Thomas Hirschhorn piece, to get to “in defense”. I have ideas and I have lines for poems, but I don’t sit down to write on specific subjects. If I did, I imagine, the poem would veer off in the opposite direction anyway.

  I don’t recall what exactly prompted me to write “in defense”, but whatever it was, I’m forever grateful—what begins as a defense of an editorial decision turns into a testimony and a call to action.

  Rail: One reason I ask is because of the title, “in defense of,” which implies that it needs a defense or response.

  Sealey: I thought about suggestions my editors made for my chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, which included edits to “candelabra with heads.” The version of the poem in my chapbook does away with that last line, the question at the poem’s end: “Who can see this and not see lynchings?” The editors believed that the line clicked shut a poem that should be otherwise unfolding, but I didn’t and don’t believe the poem was supposed to do that. Poems have different purposes. Every poem serves a different function and perhaps the purpose of “candelabra with heads” wasn’t to open, but to click shut, as they said. Perhaps it was supposed to serve as the eyes through which readers can see exactly what the speaker saw. “in defense” interrogates the removal of that last line in the chapbook and examines my impulse to include it in its entirety in Ordinary Beast.

  Rail: And so “in defense of” is about imagining how the poem could be open. A future where life has changed and as the last line puts it, “May her imagination, not her memory, run wild.”

  Sealey: Yes, “in defense” is open. The repetition of the “may” statements reads like a spell affirming future possibilities. Perhaps “candelabra with heads” was supposed to click shut, so “in defense” could open up, as each poem is doing very different work.

  Rail: The other two poems that are in conversation are the first and last poems in the book, both of which end in death, sort of. You open with “medical history” which very physically roots you to the world and end with “object permanence” which is romantic and almost liminal.

  Sealey: “medical history” speaks to the individual I, specifically the speaker’s preoccupation with that I. By the time we get to “object permanence,” however, if this is the same speaker, there is a shift in her priorities—life happened, love happened. “object permanence” is concerned with the we more than anything else. The “cento,” the book’s centerpiece poem, foreshadows this shift, as it follows the speaker from her first encounter with love to what could be read as the likely demise of it. If that makes any sense. [laughs]

  Rail: I think it makes perfect sense. I also think “object permanence” is very romantic, which may not be universal. But as you were answering I thought of “in igboland” and the lines “I want / to learn how to make something / holy, then walk away.” Something holy but temporary describes love, or our lives.

  Sealey: “object permanence” is a romantic poem. It opens with lovers waking up, there first impulse is to make sure the other is still there (as if their life together had, thus far, been a dream). In thinking about her relationship with her beloved, the speaker is reminded that there was a time, before they met, when they weren’t together and such a time will likely come again (death). Like the speaker in “in igboland,” the speaker in “object permanence” understands that nothing lasts forever. Not even love. That, indeed, every thing aspires to one / degradation or another.

  Rail: I did want to speak briefly about your day job. You became Executive Director at Cave Canem at the beginning of 2017. You’ve been working there for a few years now, you’re a former fellow, what has the organization meant to you?

  Sealey: I participated in my first poetry workshops at Cave Canem, studying under Marilyn Nelson, Willie Perdomo, Patricia Smith, and others. These workshops, mine you, were all free or low-cost. I was a youngish poet at the time, working a job that didn’t pay much, and Cave Canem provided the space and opportunity to become a better poet and to write about the issues of importance to me. I can’t stress enough necessity of a space where black poets can just be and write about whatever we want without judgment, without censor. And, to work closely with some of the best poets to have ever picked up a pen, poets like Carl Phillips, Claudia Rankine and Yusef Komunyakaa, is just short of heaven.

  My work wouldn’t be the same without Cave Canem. I probably wouldn’t even be a poet. Heck, I probably wouldn’t even be married to my husband—also a Cave Canem fellow, who I met at a mutual friend’s –another Cave Canem fellow – book party.

  Rail: Is there something that you’re trying to do or thinking about doing differently at Cave Canem?

  Sealey: Of course. In December, Cave Canem hosted its first anti-racism workshop for administrators in the literary arts field—staffers from over a dozen institutions participated. The workshop was facilitated by Cave Canem fellow, Rona Jaffe awardee and anti-oppression activist, Ama Codjoe.

  We have an internship program as well as a working fellowship program at Cave Canem, both of which train the next generation of arts administrators of color. Though this is a good start in making the field equitable, the field itself requires training to better understand and be conscious of its own biases, which is why this workshop was so important. I’m hopeful that it was the first of many anti-oppression workshops at Cave Canem, as these conversations should be ongoing—not only about race, but also sexism, homophobia, transphobia and other belief systems that mean to oppress.

• Washington Square Review - http://www.washingtonsquarereview.com/blog/2017/10/9/an-interview-with-nicole-sealey

  FIVE QUESTIONS WITH NICOLE SEALEY
  Image Credit Rachel Eliza Griffiths
  Image Credit Rachel Eliza Griffiths

  On Thursday, October 5th, Nicole Sealey read from her new collection Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017) at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House. Sealey is also the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her work has received numerous awards including the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, the Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Daniel Varoujan Award, among others. Sealey is an alumna of the creative writing program at NYU and is the executive director at Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

  Assistant Web Editor, Nadra Mabrouk, interviewed Nicole Sealey about Ordinary Beast, writing as nurturing, the mundane, and exploring our obsessions.

  1. Throughout the book, but particularly in the first section, there is a focus on the ideas of infancy as well as maternal and paternal love. In “A Violence,” the speaker imagines throwing her hypothetical maternal bone to the strays outside the window, a haunting image straddling an invited barrenness and abandonment. In so many ways, we all feel that selfishness, that desire to only have to care for ourselves, and as writers, we all feel that maternal/paternal connection to our own works. Do you often feel that you have to distance yourself from your work in order to care for and nurture yourself, or is writing the poem the act of nurturing itself for you?

  Yes, you’re absolutely right. We’re all a bit self-involved—writers and non-writers alike. As for myself, though I do feel very protective of my poems, I ultimately mean for and want them to be shared.

  Writing poems are acts of self-care to me, so I don’t feel the need to distance myself. I’m exploring my obsessions—love, loss as well as the large and small violences that have shaped me/us—and, in so doing, engaging in a lifelong conversation with myself. As this dialogue continues, I suspect feelings will change. What won’t, however, is my desire to better understand myself (and by extension you) through the process of writing.

  2. The collection grapples with being legendary and being ordinary, following the trajectory of an ordinary life such as getting married, having/not having children, and death. How does writing poetry help you investigate that tension in your own life? Do you often wish you could just be satisfied with the mundane, with our “brief animation,” as you so beautifully put it?

  I don’t think I believe in the ordinary. Our brief animation is far from routine. When I look closely, I see nuance (subtle as it might be) in what appears to be the mundane. I awake as a new person every day, influenced by what came before. Imagine this: I went to what I thought was an ordinary book launch 10 years ago and didn’t know then that my future husband was there. All that to say, life itself won’t allow our brief animation to be mundane.

  3. The idea of separating your mind from the flesh in order to let go of any racial/ancestral pain is so heart-wrenching, to cut yourself from a tormented and suppressed lineage and be so far removed from it, as mentioned in “In Defense of ‘Candelabra with Heads.’” Was writing “Candelabra with Heads” a turning point for you in your work? When was this piece born on the creation timeline of Ordinary Beast?

  If my memory serves me correctly, “Candelabra with Heads” was written in spring 2014. The poem, as you know, was inspired by Thomas Hirschhorn’s artwork of the same name in which mannequins are duct taped and mounted on a wooden platform. The poem was actually born when I saw the piece for the first time in 2012. It then took a couple years to articulate how it had inspired and affected me.

  Ordinary Beast is comprised of poems I’d written between 2011 and 2017, so “Candelabra” falls somewhere in the middle of that time.

  4. I am marveling at the impeccable construction of “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You,’” which we published an excerpt from in our latest issue. It all flows so seamlessly. Was it created moreso using lines that have always somewhat stayed with you over your writing career, or did the piece require more extensive research and time?

  Though I did have a few lines in mind for the cento, the poem required much research and years. I scanned hundreds of poetry collections for beautiful lines. I copied hundreds of lines by hand until I had at least 10 times what I needed (a traditional cento is 100 lines long). Papers with poetic lines lined my dining room table and littered my dining room floor for months. For the better half of 2016, I’d circle the table, careful not to step on the papers strewn on the floor, like a poetry shark in search of the next line and the next line and the next.

  5. Now, because of “An Apology for Trashing Magazines in Which you Appear,” I feel that I must seriously ask — how do you really feel about Brad Pitt?

  Ha! You know, back in the day, I had the biggest crush on him… I’m a married woman now, so I’m completely over Pitt. Plus, Idris Elba is more my speed.

• Brooklyn Poets Website - http://brooklynpoets.org/poet/nicole-sealey/

  POET OF THE WEEK NICOLE SEALEY
  March 10–16, 2014

  Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Central Florida, Nicole Sealey is a Cave Canem fellow and the recipient of a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. Winner of the 2012 Poetry International Prize and selected for inclusion in Best New Poets 2011, her work has appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, Poetry International, Ploughshares, and Third Coast, among other literary online and print journals. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University.

  Imagine Sisyphus Happy

  Give me tonight to be inconsolable.
  Give me just the duration of a good

  night’s dream to wade in wreckage,
  so the death drive does not declare

  itself, so the moonlight does not convince
  sunrise. I was born before sunrise—

  when morning masquerades as night,
  the temperature of blood, quivering

  like a mouth in mourning. How do we
  author our gentle birth, the height

  we were—were we gods rolling stars across
  a sundog sky, the same as scarabs?

  We fell somewhere between god
  and mineral, angel and animal,

  translated the world into man. Then believed
  a thing as sacred as the sun can rise

  and fall like an ordinary beast. Deer sniff lifeless
  fawn before leaving them, elephants

  encircle the skulls and tusks of their dead—
  none wanting to leave the bones behind,

  none knowing their leave will lessen the loss.
  But birds sometimes pluck their own

  feathers, dogs can lick themselves to wound.
  Allow me this luxury. Give me tonight

  to cut and salt the open. Give me a shovel
  to uproot the mandrake and listen

  for its scream. Give me a hard face that toils
  so closely with stone, it is itself

  stone. I promise to enter the flesh again.
  I promise to circle to ascend.

  I promise to be happy tomorrow.

  —Originally published in Poetry International, Spring 2013.

  Tell us about the making of this poem.

  I’d been thinking about “Imagine Sisyphus Happy” and had written the first and last lines of the poem in the fall of 2010—it took a couple more years to complete. I’ve always been interested in the many ways in which animals—humans included—grieve. For me, grief is not always a singular emotional state following some kind of traumatic event but, rather, an ongoing mindset. The fortunate have an innate death denying function: to live happily, they pretend they or their loved ones will not die. Sometimes, I lack such a function and believe the opposite is true: to live happily, one must embrace mortality. I suppose, too, I’m obsessed with the primitive and problematic idea of anthropocentrism. So that worked its way into the poem as well.

  What are you working on right now?

  I’m thinking about the Ghanaian artist Kane Quaye and his fanciful coffins, “trade marks” of the recently deceased—like a fish-shaped coffin for a fisherman or a shoe-shaped coffin for a shoemaker. After funerals, these beautifully carved and painted coffins are buried with the dead they incase. Let’s say I’m working on and thinking through the functionality of art.

  What’s a good day for you?

  A good day is one good line and black boys alive and well in my home state, not murdered by racist white men.

  How long have you lived in Brooklyn? What neighborhood do you live in? What do you like most about it?

  I’ve lived in Brooklyn for more than a decade. For the first year, I lived in Flatbush. After Flatbush, I moved to Crown Heights, where I am currently.

  Lucille Clifton said in an interview once, “children—and humans, everybody—all need both windows and mirrors in their lives: mirrors through which they can see themselves and windows through which they can see the world.” Clifton was talking about race—specifically the disadvantages that come with being white and having only mirrors or being a person of color and having only windows. Because the world is what it is, I’m oftentimes staring out windows. It feels good to come home to Crown Heights, get off the train, and see my reflection.

  Favorite Brooklyn poet(s), dead and/or alive?

  John Murillo. No bias. Why? Three reasons: 1.) He puts the “G” in Genius 2.) Have you read Up Jump the Boogie? 3.) He’s sitting right next to me.

  Favorite places to go in Brooklyn not involving reading or writing?

  If I’m not reading or writing, I’m probably eating. My favorite eateries are Cheryl’s Global Soul on Underhill for its brunch, Puerto Viejo on Grand for its pernil, and Richol Bakery on Nostrand for its everything.

  Last awesome book(s)/poem(s) you read?

  Horse in the Dark by Vievee Francis has an unease about it that scares the hell out of me. And, I’m absolutely in love with Amaud Jamaul Johnson’s “Cherene,” a ghazal from his most recent collection, Darktown Follies. The last couplet reads: “A modern romance. You undress, but never say a word. / I touch your ribcage, take my thumbs, & split you like a pomegranate.” Gorgeous.

  Fill in the blanks in these lines by Whitman:

  Why mess with perfection?

  I celebrate myself,

  And what I assume you should assume,

  For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

  If you have time, write a nine-line poem using these end-words (in whatever order) from Jay Z’s “Brooklyn Go Hard”: father, Dodger, jack, rob, sin, pen, love, Brooklyn, Biggie.

  Sorry, the most I can do with these words in one week is admire them.

  Why Brooklyn?

  It has both windows and mirrors.

• Poetry Foundation Website - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/nicole-sealey

  Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, and raised in Florida. She earned an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. Sealey is the author of the full-length collection The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named (2016), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors and awards include an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, a Daniel Varoujan Award, and a Poetry International Prize. She has been both a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a Poetry Project fellow and is currently the programs director at Cave Canem.

• Lambda Literary - https://www.lambdaliterary.org/interviews/12/06/nicole-sealey/

  Nicole Sealey: On Being Inspired by the NYC Ball Scene and Writing With Empathy
  by Christopher Soto
  December 6, 2017

  Nicole Sealey and I first met in 2013 when we were both studying poetry at New York University. For some reason we didn’t cross paths during the first semester of school and people kept on telling me “How is it possible that you and Nicole Sealey haven’t met yet?!” I actually remember poet Saeed Jones as the first person to pose this question to me (and he didn’t even attend our school).

  Since those years, where Nicole and I both meandered the halls of NYU, she has received fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation and CantoMundo, she has been published in the New Yorker, she has become the Executive Director of Cave Canem, and most notably her first full length collection of poetry, Ordinary Beast, was published this fall by Ecco. It is extremely rare to hear of a debut poetry collection coming off of one of the largest presses in America. This, amongst Nicole Sealey’s other accolades and work produced, is a testament to her talent and influence as a poet. Sealey was born in the Virgin Islands and raised in Florida. She currently resides in New York City, where she lives with her husband and fellow poet, John Murillo.

  In this interview, Sealey generously took some time to talk with me about the queerness of her first book, the NYC ball scene, cultural appropriation, literary inspiration, and more.

  You were known to be an extremely slow and precise writer in class.

  Yes, I write slowly. Writing is an opportunity to say exactly what I mean. I’ve never read the E.M. Foster novel that Richard Hugo mentions in chapter one of The Triggering Town, but I completed agree with the character he quotes: “How do I know what I think until I see what I’ve said?”

  When did you write the earliest poem in Ordinary Beast? How did the book come about?

  I began drafting the earliest poem in Ordinary Beast in 2005 or 2006. I couldn’t tell you when I actually finished it though. (Is a poem ever finished?) Now, with the book in my hands, the memory of the process feels so otherworldly. So much so that I often think: “How did I do this.” The gods must’ve conspired in my favor? That’s really my best answer for how the book came about.

  How did you come to poetry?

  I came to poetry about seventeen years ago on the heels of a breakup. Those poems were ego-driven and, quite frankly, not any good. A handful of years later, I found myself participating in a Cave Canem 8-week workshop. Cave Canem, as you know, is an organization dedicated to cultivating the growth of black poets and the organization to which I owe a great debt. Literally, those free workshops at Cave Canem taught me how to write poems.

  The second line of your book quickly queers the project. You write, “I’ve had sex with a man/who’s had sex with men.” Was this early queering an intentional foreshadowing?

  The early queering, as you say, was unintentional—maybe subconsciously intentional. I knew I wanted to open Ordinary Beast with a poem that would allow me to say who I am, what I believe and who I love up front. “Medical History,” I think, does this, addressing what the reader can expect both aesthetically and politically. Aesthetically, lyric-narrative (heavy on the lyric). Politically, pro-love.

  By the fifth poem in the book, “Legendary,” Venus Xtravaganza appears. What is your relationship to the ball scene?

  Oh, yes, Venus Extravaganza. (As a Latinx trans woman, Xtravaganza understood the kind of currency whiteness carries and earnestly wished to be a “spoiled rich white girl.”)

  I’ve attended balls as an admirer—an art enthusiast and lover of all things beautiful. A friend of fifteen years actually promotes and sponsors balls across the country. His love of and enthusiasm for the art inspired mine. Plus, believe it or not, I was my high school’s homecoming queen, so the pomp and circumstance of it all felt/feels very natural to me.

  I’m thinking about how often culture created by black women is appropriated by white gay men. I’m wondering what it means for a cis-hetereo black woman to use the language and culture of the ball scene. Do you believe there is a difference between appropriation, embodiment, and homage?

  The “Legendary” poems, of which there are three in Ordinary Beast, are my limited and loose impressions of Venus Xtravaganza, Pepper LaBeija and Octavia Saint Laurent. I’m not attempting to speak for them. It’s not my place to do so, nor would I want to.

  The obvious differences between the white gay males about whom you speak and me are power and privilege. As a black woman, I have my own oppression from which to draw. And, I make a conscious effort to write from a point of empathy and inclusion. There’s a big difference between appropriation, embodiment and homage. Appropriation is colonization. Embodiment, depending on treatment, is exoticization. Homage is exaltation. Empathy, I think, allows for exaltation.

  You’re generous with your credits to figures in the ball scene and the relationship feels genuine. How did you conduct research for the series? How did you decide whom to honor?

  Without the genius of Xtravaganza, LaBeija and Saint Laurent there would be no “Legendary.” I kid you not, I must’ve watched Paris Is Burning (in part or entirely) at least 200 times. I attended balls, watched hours of pageants, researched performers, sat with the work, and became best friends with Webster’s Rhyming Dictionary.

  A decade ago, I had it in my mind to write a poem to honor each person featured in Paris Is Burning… It hasn’t quite worked out that way. I have failed poems not in Ordinary Beast, for example, inspired by Dorian Corey, Willie Ninja and Freddie Pendavis. I haven’t yet found the words for these poems (or the words haven’t yet found me?). The Ordinary Beast galley includes the Dorian Corey poem, but I actually pulled it at the 25th hour because it didn’t feel finished.

  As you likely know, Paris is Burning, has had some controversy around the film. Many queer activists of color have said that the white film director exploited the New York Ball scene for the film. What are your thoughts about using this film as a reference point?

  From what I’ve read, those featured got very little for their time and talent. Since its release, Paris Is Burning has received more than a dozen awards and honors. It has made more than 3.5 million dollars and can now be streamed on Netflix. The producers, however, have paid approximately $55,000 to thirteen people featured in the film, which is about $4,200 each. This is the very definition of exploitation. Folks signed releases, so the producers’ actions, I believe, are within the law but without morals.

  The filmmakers have exploited and continue to exploit a group of people who were generous enough to allow them access. I credit the film because ethically I must, but all praise to the people whose art is the actual inspiration for these poems.

  How do the “Legendary” poems interact with each other? Do the epigraphs inspire the content, or does the content inspire the epigraph selections?

  These poems are in conversation. Seeing that they’re coming from the same place of awe and honor, how could they not be in dialogue?

  The epigraphs inspired and drove the content. Without the epigraphs, I’d be lost, especially considering these poems are Shakespearean sonnets and, therefore, bound by form. The epigraphs (and the form) provided direction, without which these poems would have no end.

  If you could be in any house, which house would you be in? Why?

  I know better than to answer this question. (That’ like asking me which sorority would I have pledged.)

  I’m thinking about the phrase “drag queen” and how it was sometimes used to reference trans women. How do you treat queer jargon of the past in relationship to definitions and distinctions of today? How do you code-switch (and time-switch) amongst the communities in Ordinary Beast?

  It becomes easy to code switch when code-switching is part of your everyday life. The one word I use specific to the ball scene is “fem-realness,” and I believe the term was used back in the day and is still used today. Because this world is not my own, I am careful not to behave overly familiar—I want to always err on the side of sensitivity and respect.

  I know the difference between in-group and out-group language. I don’t want to be that person who not only over stays her welcome but also comes to believe the house is half hers. It isn’t. As an ally, I know my place.

  In the poem “Virginia is for Lovers” you note “LaToya’s Pride picnic.” The word “pride” changes the atmosphere of the poem. How did you decide on this inclusion? Do you consider this work part of a queer literary tradition?

  “Virginia is for Lovers” was literally inspired by an incident that happened at a friend’s annual Pride picnic. Not that poems ought to always tell the truth but, in this instance, the truth better served the poem. I couldn’t see the scene anywhere except at the “Pride picnic,” which situates the poem in a place as well as a politic.

  I identify as an ally, so I don’t consider this work part of a queer literary tradition. I could see, however, how one might consider it in the tradition of witness.

  Before we end, a quick question about craft. Do you often write in closed form? It’s rare (and impressive) to come by these days.

  I’ve found that poems sometimes demand received forms. About half of Ordinary Beast is written in a form other than free verse—even the poems that appear informal have formal elements. Form is a poetic tool just as metaphor and enjambment are poetic tools. I’m just trying to use all the tools in my toolbox.

• Barnes & Noble - https://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/not-heartbeat-moan-nicole-sealey

  “Not a heartbeat, but a moan”: Nicole Sealey
  A Conversation with Amy Gall / September 27, 2017 Share

  One might not expect a collection of poetry with subject matter as diffuse as a lynching and the board game Clue to hang together. But Nicole Sealey’s second book, Ordinary Beast, manages to perfectly blend the heartbreaking and the hilarious — often in a single stanza. A timely and haunting meditation on love, gender, race, and the body, Ordinary Beast is already receiving high praise, landing on NPR’s most anticipated Poetry Books of 2017 list and Publishers Weekly‘s Top 10 Poetry Books of 2017.

  When she is not writing, Sealey is the executive director of Cave Canem, an organization that cultivates and supports the work of black poets, with its fellows going on to win, among other awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award. Sealey credits the poets she has worked with through Cave Canem with keeping her on her literary toes.

  I spoke with Sealey during the harried days before her book launch about the importance of accessible language in poetry, self-care, and the many meanings of love. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. —Amy Gall

  The Barnes & Noble Review: I remember seeing you read some of these poems last year, and I was struck by how different it feels reading them by myself. There’s something simultaneously more intimate and lonelier about not having you, the writer narrating the experience. Do you feel like you write for both the page and the stage? What are you most attuned to when you are writing a poem?

  Ordinary Beast
  Hardcover $20.49 | $24.99

  Add to Bag

  See All Formats & Editions ›

  Nicole Sealey: I remember that reading and I hear you. I think, though, listening to a poet read her work at a venue and reading a poet’s work alone at home are two very different experiences. In the former, the poet is much more aware of the once abstract idea of an “audience” and, accordingly, curates a “set” of poems. In between poems, that poet may engage the audience in a back-and-forth and provide backstory for specific poems. At home alone, however, a reader gets none of that; but, what she will get is a chance to sit with the work at length and, in so doing, sit with herself and her own thoughts at length, which can feel lonely.

  Without thought to how poems will eventually be shared, I just try to write the best poems I can, given my limitations as an imperfect person. To me, a poem is a translation of thought and experience into something capable of being shared and, to some extent, understood — no matter page or stage.

  BNR: I’m always fascinated by how poets approach the overall structure of a book and how they know when a collection is done. What was the process of working on this collection like for you?

  NS: My approach has always been poem by poem. Making a poem, in my opinion, is less daunting than making a book. Had I been writing towards a collection, I probably would not have completed Ordinary Beast, and if I had, it would be a very different book — one that doesn’t reflect my natural associative way of thinking.

  About her way of writing, poet Adélia Prado said, “Who am I to organize the flight of the poem.” Not only do I agree, but I would also apply this attitude to the overall structure of the book and knowing when it’s finished.

  BNR: When you are writing poems like “Legendary,” in which you reference Venus Xtravaganza, Pepper LeBeija, and Octavia Saint Laurent, from the documentary Paris Is Burning, is the narrator of those poems purely a persona, or is it also your own voice? Do you find that poetry gives you an opportunity to slip into characters or fictive voices, or are you most often writing from your own experience?

  NS: Those poems are a combination of personae (not Xtravaganza, LaBeija, or Saint Laurent, exactly, but my limited and loose impressions of them) and myself. I’m not as wise or as charismatic as they were, so I knew early on that my voice would have to do. Who am I to speak for anyone anyway? Voice for the voiceless is a phrase that floats around whenever poets write from a perspective other than their own. I don’t subscribe to that, because no one is without voice.

  Though poetry does provide me with the opportunity to slip into characters, those characters, if not myself, are fictional — ones I’ve invented based on real people and for the purposes of specific poems. Poetry also allows me to slip into and out of character, my own character. By nature, I’m a classic introvert. With the “Legendary” series, however, I allowed myself to be a bit of a show-off, a showman. It felt good!

  I always write from my own experience — I have no other choice. Even if I were to imitate a poet, the style might be theirs but the voice would still be my own. Everything I write (or think or do) is influenced by what I’ve seen and experienced across my thirty-seven-odd years.

  BNR: You thank the reader in your dedication and speak to the reader in your work. Do you have a reader or audience in mind when you write? Who do you imagine them to be?

  NS: I do, yes! I’m so thankful to my readers. There are millions and millions of books in the world. That readers pick up Ordinary Beast is a great blessing that shouldn’t go unmentioned, so it doesn’t. Plus, the book is a conversation between readers and myself, so why not talk directly with them? That’s the least I can do as an active participant in the conversation.

  I hope my audience is anyone/everyone who reads — the more the merrier. I don’t have a specific “audience” in mind so much as a person I envision during the writing process. My computer screen might as well be a mirror, because I imagine someone who looks like me — a black woman. I’m comfortable in her company and am able to be myself, whatever myself is at that moment.

  BNR: There is a line in “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You’ “ where you say love is “not a heartbeat but a moan.” To me that conjures a sense of love that is intense but fleeting. What do you think love is and did writing this collection change or influence your concept of love?

  NS: The average person’s life isn’t that long, if they’re lucky about seventy-nine years. Of those years, exactly how many are filled with love? Love is fleeting because life itself is fleeting. And, there are many kinds of love — romantic love, as you know, is different than familial love.

  Love is indescribable. If I had to describe the romantic love about which “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You’ ” is referring, I’d say that it is an admixture of ecstasy, duende, negative capability, and desire. The line, “Love is like this; / not a heartbeat, but a moan,” I think, best describes this admixture.

  Merely living has made me think more frequently and critically about love, which is probably the case with most people. With Ordinary Beast, I was able to continue my exploration of the abstraction. I still don’t have any answers, but at least I know what questions I’d ask if ever given the opportunity for definitive answers.

  BNR: Bodily pain is so present in these poems, particularly the ways black bodies are misrepresented or trapped or violated. How do you approach writing about difficult subjects? How do you take care of yourself in that process?

  NS: I take care of myself by actually approaching the difficult subjects head-on. If I didn’t, I’d be a passive participant in my own life. I couldn’t live with that. That wouldn’t champion equity, nor would it cultivate creative risk. Instinctively, I want to live and be as happy as possible while doing so. I want the same for those I love. I want the same for those I don’t know. For those who’ll exist long after I’m gone.

  One only needs to open her eyes to see that there is an active, one-sided war against black and brown people in this country, in particular, and in the world at large. Though black pain is a theme in Ordinary Beast, so too is black history, black resilience, black excellence, black power, black joy and black love. All of which sustains me.

  BNR: How has your role as executive director of Cave Canem influenced your approach to your work, and how the heck do you find the time to write?

  NS: My role as executive director doesn’t influence the way I approach my creative work — though it does affect the regularity of it. Given that there is much to learn in my new role, I haven’t had much time to write. My first day was January 2, 2017. I suspect this will be the case for at least the first year of my tenure.

  Now, my time as a Cave Canem fellow and former workshop participant, on the other hand, has made me a craftswoman and diligent reviser. These poets do not play — they bring their A-game at all times. To roll with them, I’ve had to learn to do the same.

  BNR: Who are your poetic influences?

  NS: This question always gets the best of me because I end up forgetting someone. All that to say, forgive my memory, as I attempt to name a few of my poetic influences in alpha-order: Catherine Barnett, Lucille Clifton, Andrea Cohen, Martha Collins, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Yusef Komunyakaa, Li-Young Lee, Larry Levis, John Murillo, Marilyn Nelson, Sharon Olds, Willie Perdomo, Carl Phillips, Patrick Phillips, Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare, Patricia Smith, Tracy K. Smith, among others.

  BNR: What do you hope for or imagine the future of black poetry to be?

  NS: Black poetry is poetry. Black poets will continue to write. My hope for the field is that it expands further, that it welcomes the contributions of poets of color.

  BNR: What is your favorite thing about language?

  NS: My favorite thing about language is its accessibility, which is one of the things I value most in a poem. At its best, language clarifies, or at least attempts to clarify, one’s thoughts or feelings on a subject. What a great gift we have!

Ordinary Beast
Diego Baez
Booklist. 114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p31.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Ordinary Beast. By Nicole Sealey. Sept. 2017.80p. Ecco, $24.99 (9780062688804); e-book (97800626888281.811.

This is the first full-length poetry collection from Sealey, an award-winning writer whose debut arrives with much anticipation. Sealey's astute and searing verses revel in the tragedy and wonder of the black experience in the U.S. In 'Virginia is for lovers," a dexterous poem that performs humor, history, and compassion, the speaker misunderstands a conversation, undercutting a friend's deeply serious revelation. A swaggering series of poems titled "legendary," scattered throughout the collection, include epigraphs by performers featured in Paris Is Burning (1990), the landmark documentary about multicultural, LBGTQ drag fashion competitions. Sealey flexes her formal innovation in "Cento for the Night I Said, 'I Love You,'" which consists entirely of lines sampled from 100 other poets, and "Clue," an ironically vivacious poem based on the morbid board game. As executive director at the Cave Canem Foundation, Sealey has worked tirelessly to promote African American poets. This virtuosic collection belongs beside Claudia Rankine's Citizen (2014), Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal (2016), and Samiya Bashir's Field Theories (2017).--Diego Baez

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Baez, Diego. "Ordinary Beast." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 31. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161496/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5c02c58f. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161496

Ordinary Beast: Poems
Publishers Weekly. 264.26 (June 26, 2017): p152.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Ordinary Beast: Poems

Nicole Sealey. Ecco, $24.99 (80p) ISBN 978-0-06-268880-4

Sealey's elegant and elemental debut acts as a balm for and protectant against the hazards of modernity. Though her poems are very much in and of the material world, Sealey's gifts of attention and distillation resist any tendency toward superficial excess and distraction. Brief poems leave no room for flourishes, moving instead with lithe musicality toward the universal. She locates the human condition succinctly--"We fit somewhere between god/ and mineral"--and attends to the vast range of experiences contained therein. One of the collection's longer poems, "Cento for the Night I Said, 'I Love You,'" is a gorgeous meditation on human connection; the cento, a form composed solely of quotations, nods to the ways in which expressions of love are at once culturally inherited and unmistakably one's own. The collection also contains playful riffs on pop culture, including sonnets in voices from the film Paris is Burning and a sestinalike poem featuring the characters from Clue (which is then subsequently recast in a spare, sober erasure). But there are also images of racism and violence--and in one of the book's many withering-yet-beautiful turns, Sealey wagers, "Every thing aspires to one/ degradation or another. I want/ to make something/ holy, then walk away." And yet, instead of walking away, Sealey engages with the world patiently and courageously. (Sept.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ordinary Beast: Poems." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2017, p. 152. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497444226/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c6f32088. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A497444226

Baez, Diego. "Ordinary Beast." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 31. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161496/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5c02c58f. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018. "Ordinary Beast: Poems." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2017, p. 152. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497444226/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c6f32088. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.

• BookPage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/21928-nicole-sealey-ordinary-beast#.Wn_K9ryWZph
  Word count: 374

  Web Exclusive – September 12, 2017

  ORDINARY BEAST
  A poet's captivating debut
  BookPage review by August Smith

  Nicole Sealey navigates heavy ideas with felicity and skill in her hotly anticipated debut collection, Ordinary Beast. Though the world her poems inhabit is marked by violence and confusion, they counter this chaos with humor and clarity; her language is plainspoken, exacting and beautiful, often leading to linguistic pearls of surprising wisdom and depth.

  Ordinary Beast’s field of examination is identity: race, wealth, family, the body, the unstable self. In “It’s Not Fitness, It’s a Lifestyle,” she muses, “I’m waiting for a white woman / in this overpriced Equinox / to mistake me for someone other / than a paying member” and then shifts from this potentiality to the image of a bird stuck in an airport: “I ask myself / what is it doing here? I’ve come / to answer: what is any of us?” Going from the personal to the universal through metaphor is a classic move, but to do so in 13 short, punchy, aerodynamic lines shows Sealey at her best.

  Sealey's poetry is most striking when she plays with forms. There are traditional and experimental sonnets, a sestina about the board game Clue, an erasure of said sestina, a cento and more. Sealey comfortably colors within the lines of these forms, breaking from their constraints when her personable voice ideates a less rigid and more interesting path.

  In the ekphrastic “Candelabra with Heads,” Sealey invents a form that reverses the order of the lines halfway through, a time-warp that forces the reader to relive every phrase in new contexts. Later in the collection, “In Defense of ‘Candelabra with Heads’” deconstructs the first poem, speaking to the reader directly and pointing out the original poem’s potential flaws. The reader becomes aware of the pliability of voice, and by proxy, the self.

  Ordinary Beast is full of these neat devices, but they never distract from the core of warmth and familiarity that drives these poems to the heart. Technical prowess means nothing when a poet’s music can remind us who we are, “how we entertain the angels / with our brief animation.”

• New York Journal of Books
  https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/ordinary-beast-poems
  Word count: 953

  Ordinary Beast: Poems
  Image of Ordinary Beast: Poems
  Author(s):
  Nicole Sealey
  Release Date:
  September 11, 2017
  Publisher/Imprint:
  Ecco
  Pages:
  80
  Buy on Amazon

  Reviewed by:
  Laverne Frith
  “Sealey’s passions radiate and radiate through these poems.”

  While Ordinary Beast is her first full-length collection, Nicole Sealey’s individual poems are widely published in such distinguished venues as The New Yorker and The American Poetry Review. She is executive director of Cave Canem Foundation.

  In this volume, Sealey, in her breezy, formal-verging-on-experimental style, tackles an eclectic mix of themes and subject matters ranging from childlessness to racially influenced social patterns; from a wildly imaginative version of the board game, Clue; to a series of interspersed monologues for the African American transgenders and female impersonators who starred in the iconic documentary film, Paris Is Burning (1991).

  Sealey’s dizzyingly addictive spectacle of subject matters is rendered in a complex assortment of free-verse lyrics, sonnets (sometimes nonce, sometimes traditional), a double sestina, an extended cento, and at least one form Sealey claims as her own: the obverse.

  Given this impressive accumulation of variables, how to find a predominant theme? Easy: Sealey focuses on made things, on art and the artifice that construct it, on mannequins and performers remaking themselves, on paintings and poems and souvenirs, on the individual human being who, through reworking the elements of this world, self-transmogrify into minor species of creator-god.

  “a violence,” for example, discusses the infant the poet might have had, should she have had “. . . a maternal bone,/.” Such a bone would have been hidden away “. . . inside a barren nesting doll/you’ve had since you were a child . . .,” the entire act of bearing and birthing being subsumed in this instance by an artifact.

  In the ekphrastic obverse, “candelabra with heads,” Sealey addresses “this brood of mannequins, cocooned/and mounted on a wooden scaffold,/.”

  “Can you see them hanging? . . .” she muses, setting the stage for the obverse’s volta, or turn, in the next stanza, where the poem inverts and repeats backwards in every element but the final line: “Who can see this and not see lynchings?/” In this case, the candelabra (the made thing) with its mannequins becomes a racialized symbology of death, no less real for its being a carefully wrought artifact standing in as metaphor.

  In the poem, “the first person who will live to be one hundred and fifty years old has already been born,” Sealey recalls finding herself in the same room as the Mona Lisa which “. . . was encased in glass . . . ,” the separational qualities of which Sealey compares to human skin, conflating the art piece with the human organism.

  In the poem, “in igboland,” after a plague of locusts has ravaged the area, residents build a mansion of dirt and clay, decorate it with bone china and statues, and then proceed to burn down as much of the structure as possible, destroying the work of their hands to appease the greater gods.

  “. . . I want/to learn how to make something/holy, then walk away . . .” writes Sealey, the ability to walk away from the destruction of our own artifacts becoming at once terrifying and god-like.

  In the sonnet, “legendary,” Pepper Labeija, a female impersonator, observes, “Outside these walls I may be irrelevant,/but here I’m the Old and the New Testament./” Artifice, if just for a performance, triumphs over nature, Pepper’s transformational skill and imagination verging on a religious gift.

  The extended “cento for the night i said, ‘i love you’” occupies several pages towards the center of the book. Given that a cento is a poem completely comprised of lines from other poets’ poems, such a selection is a perfect paean to the concept of artifice—all those disconnected lines carefully sought out and pieced together to form a coherent whole with a new and previously unintended meaning.

  The hilarious double sestina, “clue,” with the complex word repetition patterns characteristic of the sestina, is based on the murder-mystery board game of the same name.

  This tour de force treatment is continued in the very next poem, “c ue,” an erasure version continuing the story the double sestina began. Nothing is as artfully designed as a good murder mystery—unless, of course, it’s a good sestina. Here the bemused reader finds both under the same roof.

  In “underperforming sonnet overperforming,” Sealey assures us the poem is “. . . the best sonnet/to ever sonnet—formal guarantees/of a good time . . .,” the aesthetic of the sonnet somehow standing in for an actual sonnet in this instance, given that the actual poem is, according to the author, “. . . entirely imageless./”

  We are busy manufacturing our own small gods, worshipping the work of our hands, delighting in our own artifice. In “even the gods,” Sealy assures us that “. . . Even gods have gods.”

  Nicole Sealey clearly has the potential of becoming a breakthrough poet through the aegis of her insights and talents, her passionate enthusiasms, her incisive formal stance, and her unflinching aesthetic.

  Her commitment to a more inclusive and congealing world is evident. Sealey’s passions radiate and radiate through these poems. They are unleashed.

  Laverne Frith is a 16-year, monthly columnist for Living in the West magazine, proprietor of Frith Press, co-editor of Ekphrasis—A Poetry Journal, and co-author of reviews for Literary Magazine Review. Mr. Frith is widely published, an award-winning author of the poetry collection Imagining the Self (Cherry Grove Collections, 2011) and several poetry chapbooks.

• Miami Rail
  https://miamirail.org/reviews/ordinary-beast-nicole-sealey/
  Word count: 535

  A SURVIVOR’S PRAYER: A REVIEW OF ORDINARY BEAST BY NICOLE SEALEY
  Candice Mays
  Print FriendlyPrint Friendly

  Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey, Ecco/Harper Collins, 80pp.
  Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast emotionally builds throughout the collection from trauma, to love, ultimately breaching into the last frontier of hope. Her work ambitiously unveils the reality of being Black from the sightlines of narrators stripped of their humanity. Each of the collection’s three nuanced sections covers a different aspect of the human spirit’s perseverance in the face of racism’s devastation.

  Orange flares fire at once in the collection’s leading poem, “Medical History.” A list of countless diseases and ailments running through the narrator’s family tree leaves her “spooked by wind.” Liable to drop dead from anything at any moment demands the superhuman powers reflected in “Hysterical Strength.” Spotlighting the black community’s will to live by leaping over the hurdles it faces, Sealey’s “thoughts turn to black people -/ the hysterical strength we must / possess to survive our very existence/ which I fear many believe is, and / treat as, itself a freak occurrence.”

  The structure of Sealey’s work frequently pulls the reader through pain in order to give them relief in the end. What is believed to be a poem about a breakup in “Virgina is for Lovers” suddenly swerves lanes. While the narrator fantasizes about living a glamorous single life with her friend, Leonard, confesses. “No…/ I got the H In V. H I – ”. Although his revelation snatches her dream, the narrator remains optimistic, choosing to fight for her friend and his life instead. “As if he’d been newly ordained, I took his hands and kissed them.” In order to survive one must see the light in places of complete darkness and most importantly, find God while living in the midst of hell.

  Judgement day is coming for everyone complicit in racism and “Even the Gods” makes this assertion. Like with much of the work in Ordinary Beast, the punch comes in the final two sentences, “Even the eyes of gods / must adjust to light. Even the gods have gods.” And when the gods of racism are finally forced to pay up, “In Defense of ‘Candelabra with Heads’” prays that when the day comes that “someone be black / and so far removed from the verb lynch that she be / dumbfounded by its meaning.” If for Sealey, the idea of gods being punished for their wrongdoings is not so farfetched, then surely her dream for this little girl is feasible.

  Racism literally kills. And while the external element of racism is awful, it is not nearly as bad as the havoc the institution wreaks internally. Nicole Sealey’s, collection painstakingly removes the tarred and feathered skin of Black Americans revealing the brains, organs, and diseased tissue pulsing beneath. Her poems walk us through pain in order to bring us to light. Transforming moments of tragedy into solidarity, Ordinary Beast catapults the reader into an atmosphere of hope.

  Candice Mays is a writer and educator pursuing an MFA at the University of Miami.

Word Count