Contemporary Authors

1. Ordinary beast : poems https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036984 Sealey, Nicole, author. Poems. Selections Ordinary beast : poems / Nicole Sealey. First Ecco hardcover edition. New York, NY : Ecco, 2017. pages cm PS3619.E25515 A6 2017 ISBN: 9780062688804 (hardback) 2. The animal after whom other animals are named : poems https://lccn.loc.gov/2015031418 Sealey, Nicole, author. The animal after whom other animals are named : poems / Nicole Sealey. Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, [2016] 24 pages ; 18 cm. PS3619.E25515 A84 2016 ISBN: 9780810133129 (pbk. : alk. paper)

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

  Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors include a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, 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.

• Poetry Foundation - 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.

• Cave Canem - http://cavecanempoets.org/staff/

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  Nicole Sealey, Executive Director

  sealey-edBorn in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast, forthcoming from Ecco in fall 2017, 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 Foundation, Inc., MacDowell Colony and the Poetry Project. Sealey holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University.

• Poets.org - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/nicole-sealey

  Nicole Sealey
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  Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
  Texts about this Poet:
  P.O.P Video Featuring Nicole Sealey

  Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She received an MFA from New York University and an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida. Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast (Ecco Press), which is forthcoming in 2017. She has received fellowships and awards from CantoMundo, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Elizabeth George Foundation, among others. She is the executive director at Cave Canem Foundation and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Ordinary Beast
Diego Baez
Booklist.
114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p31. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161496/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=fcf1ef68. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161496
1 of 2 3/23/18, 8:29 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Ordinary Beast: Poems
Publishers Weekly.
264.26 (June 26, 2017): p152. From Book Review Index Plus. 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. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497444226/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=2b627c0d. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497444226
2 of 2 3/23/18, 8:29 PM

Baez, Diego. "Ordinary Beast." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 31. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161496/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=fcf1ef68. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018. "Ordinary Beast: Poems." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2017, p. 152. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497444226/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2b627c0d. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018.

• 4 Columns
  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2017/09/nicole-sealeys-organic-instinctive-ordinary-beast
  Word count: 1200

  Ordinary Beast
  Christopher Richards

  A candelabra with heads: formal innovation and unstable truth in Nicole Sealey’s first poetry collection.

  Ordinary Beast, by Nicole Sealey, Ecco, 64 pages, $24.99

  • • •

  In November 2016, a “bluish foreign body” was found by doctors under the eyelid of a British woman during routine surgery. The patient had an “uncomfortable and gritty” feeling in her eye, a complaint she chalked up to aging, although once the large glob was extracted it revealed itself to be twenty-seven disposable contact lenses, which she had failed to remove. This medical oddity was fodder for local newscasts, but it’s hard for me not to lift it up as a parable. How long we endure our self-made discomforts, how easily our vision can deceive us, how little we can be trusted with our own care.

  Like us, the characters in Nicole Sealey’s debut poetry collection Ordinary Beast are burdened by eyes ill-equipped to read the world in front of them, minds distorted by the terrors of history, bodies all too aware of what she describes as our “brief animation.” Sealey, a US Virgin Islands-born and Florida-raised poet, has emerged as a vital figure in the contemporary poetry scene; she is also the executive director of Cave Canem Foundation, an organization dedicated to cultivating the voices of African American poets and as reliable an incubator of new talent as any MFA program. Despite being early in her career, Sealey bears the grace of a writer with full command over her gifts, a command that is thrillingly at odds with the out-of-joint universe of her poetry.

  In one of Sealey’s most arresting poems, “candelabra with heads,” her speaker views a Thomas Hirschhorn sculpture and conjures the lurid scene of a lynching. In restless lines of self-examination, she thinks, “Had I not brought with me my mind / as it has been made, this thing, / . . . might be eight infants swaddled” or “eight fleshy fingers on one hand.” She understands that seeing takes part as much in the brain as it does in the eye—we adapt what we see into what our minds have come to expect, and here a sculpture of humanoid shapes mounted on a wooden scaffold with packing tape forms itself into a distinct scene of horror.

  The poem is an obverse, a formal innovation invented by Sealey whereby the poem’s first half is repeated in reverse order in the second half of the poem (the fourteenth line repeats as the fifteenth line, the thirteenth line repeats as the sixteenth line, and so on). In “candelabra with heads” these reversals create new, frightening juxtapositions in thought, the structure of the poem escalating the obsessive dread. But rather than ending the poem with its first line—as the form would lead the reader to anticipate—Sealey subverts our expectation and concludes with a new line that is the poem’s thesis: “Who can see this and not see lynchings?” Formal structures—including sonnets, sestinas, a cento, an erasure, standard rhyme schemes—are employed throughout Ordinary Beast, and Sealey’s playful use of them is organic and instinctive. While her adventures in style and form aren’t uniformly satisfying, they refreshingly demonstrate a provocative point of view rather than mere banal displays of skill. In Sealey’s poems, we are bound to history, particularly the dreadful legacy of racism, and her formalism can read as a subtle acknowledgment of the preexisting world we are born into and have to make our way against.

  Ordinary Beast opens with “medical history,” a sonnet in which the speaker details a litany of ailments suffered by her and her family. The suffering in the bodies of her elders appears to be destiny, history is in their flesh. The turn in the sonnet provides us, and the speaker, with no comfort. After the causes of death of two relatives are named (aneurysm, heart attack), we learn that an uncle has eluded the family’s history of disease by being hit by a car. The poem resolves itself in a brutal fiction: “the stars in the sky are already dead.” Most of the stars we see are not in fact dead. But can we blame the speaker for thinking this amid the experiences of her kin?

  One of Sealey’s more beguiling tricks is how she rearranges perspective. “imagine sisyphus happy” invites us to see suffering as a natural craving, and the speaker begs to be left alone to indulge in it.

  Deer sniff lifeless fawns before leaving,
  elephants encircle the skulls and tusks

  of their dead—none wanting to leave
  the bones behind, none knowing

  their leave will lessen the loss.

  The speaker implores “Allow me this / luxury. Give me tonight to cut / and salt the open.”

  With her quicksilver language and sleights of hand, what exactly is Nicole Sealey up to? Take the end of her poem “in igboland,” which centers around townspeople building a “mansion / of dirt” for a god who has just unleashed “plagues of red locusts.” Imagining this sacrifice set ablaze, she writes:

  Every thing aspires to one
  degradation or another. I want
  to learn how make something
  holy, then walk away.

  The temptation is to read “in igboland” as an ars poetica and there’s certainly some sincerity to the lines. But her slyness makes it difficult to accept her words at face value. Throughout the collection identity is fluid; expressions of self are refracted through the voices of others (particularly in “legendary,” a sequence of poems about the drag queens and trans women from the documentary Paris Is Burning). Truth, where it can be found, is unstable. Perhaps the most vulnerable and unguarded poem in the collection is “cento for the night i said, ‘i love you,’ ” a raw and piercing work whose intimacy is belied by its form: a cento is a magpie poem drawn completely from quotation.

  When poet Lucille Clifton was asked about why she wrote children’s literature, she responded, “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.” In an interview with the website Brooklyn Poets, Sealey quoted this pearl from Clifton while describing the merits of finding her “reflection” in her neighbors in Crown Heights, but it could just as easily be a description of her achievement in Ordinary Beast: creating mirrors and windows. The mirrors may be convex or cracked, the windows curtained over or stained; seeing is never simple in Sealey’s world, a place where “even the gods misuse,” “misread,” and “misquote.” But still she grants us glimpses of exquisite clarity—about blackness in America, about love in the face of mortality—and more than a little beauty for our bleary eyes.

  Christopher Richards is a poet and editor from Minnesota. He has contributed to The New Yorker’s Page-Turner, The Nation, The Millions, Guernica, and After Dark.

• New York Journal of Books
  https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/ordinary-beast-poems
  Word count: 957

  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.
  Buy on Amazon

• Medium The Coil
  https://medium.com/the-coil/book-review-nicole-sealey-ordinary-beast-margaryta-golovchenko-186e655a4172
  Word count: 1055

  On Nicole Sealey’s ‘Ordinary Beast’
  Sealey’s poetry collection is a well-crafted puzzle that dares to be challenged head-on, promising that its full form is not what it seems.

  Nicole Sealey
  Poetry
  80 pages
  6” x 9”
  Hardcover
  Also available in eBook formats
  Review Format: eBook
  ISBN 9780062688804
  First Edition
  Ecco
  New York, New York, USA
  Available HERE
  $24.99

  It is rumored gods grow
  where the blood of a hanged man drips.

  (“Even the Gods,” p 54).

  Picking up Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast, I expected it to be a one-sitting type of read. The experience turned out to be quite different, as I spent several hours poring over the poems, my impression of the collection changing from puzzled to awestruck to appreciative. It left me not only convinced that Sealey is a master of her craft, but also renewed my appreciation for the process of reading and responding to poetry. Ordinary Beast is like a well-crafted puzzle that dares to be challenged head-on, promising that its full form is not what it seems.

  From the beginning, Sealey’s poems aim for the underbelly with their approach to the topics of sexuality, colonialism, and gender, keeping the reader company at all times with the inescapable presence of another individual. Rather than feeling watched, the effect is one of self-regulation on the reader’s part, following the rhythm of each consecutive poem and asking, “How do the words make me feel? Was I expecting this?” Sealey shows that there are myriad ways to ask and answer, stripping away the dichotomy of one question/one answer. Instead, the collection focuses on continuity in subject and tone, the lines

  I want a white
  house in Peekskill, far from the city — white
  picket fence fencing in my lily-white
  lilies.

  (“Legendary,” p 6)

  carrying over into consecutive poems, such as “In Igboland,” which declares that

  The West in me wants the mansion
  to last. The African knows it cannot.

  (“In Igboland,” p 12).

  Often, sequence poems feel like an easy, almost safe way out of the constant fast and direct pace of individual, self-contained poems. With Sealey, this is never the case, as the poem “Legendary” proves. The writing speaks for itself so clearly and confidently that one doesn’t want to do anything other than let it carry him away. It was this poem that made me feel like I was being invited into the collection despite my personal inability to relate to some of the struggles and injustices mentioned in the poem. There is an effective simplicity to each part of the sequence that appeals to the sensitive core found in all of us, and Sealey’s satirical quip at the stereotypical white dream thus found its mark with me in a slightly different way, resonating with my continued confusion as an immigrant to North America who still finds many Western ideas foreign, including the bizarre suburban American Dream life.

  These have been examples of poetic excellence that I was hoping, even expecting, to find in Ordinary Beast, but the true strength of the collection lay in the poems that appeared sporadically like mystery boxes, springing up among the others, their contents wonderful surprises that one doesn’t know what to do with right away. The two poem pairs — “Candelabra With Heads” and “In Defense of ‘Candelabra With Heads,’” as well as “Clue” and “Cue” — are worth paying special attention to, as they’re Sealey’s challenge to how the writer’s craft is perceived. They show the reader both progress and a glimpse into the “writer’s logic” through the inclusion of both the original poem and its erasure version, in the case of the “Clues,” as well as in the explanatory tone of “In Defense Of.” Another noteworthy poem in this regard was “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You,’” which demonstrates how context shapes our appreciation of writing, for it is only from the notes in the back that the reader learns that the entire piece is composed solely of lines taken from the works of other poets.

  There were only a few poems that felt pale compared to the complex vibrancy found in the majority of the poems. This was particularly the case with “Happy Birthday to Me,” whose tone is more contemporary and jagged for modernity’s sake. It was also the first time that I found myself disagreeing with some of the images used by a poet, like when Sealey tells the reader

  A body, I’ve read, can sustain
  its own sick burning, its own hell, for hours.
  It’s the mind. It’s the mind that cannot.

  (“A Violence,” p 2).

  These were the only moments when her poems’ hold slipped on me, when I became preoccupied with pondering over how “truthful” such statements were.

  In the context of the entire collection, these instances were so negligible that they will likely only be dwelled upon by readers who enjoy sinking their teeth analytically into their poetry, both to agree with and to challenge the poet and to see as many facets of the piece as possible. I was comfortably captivated by poems like “Virginia for Lovers,” my favorite, and was too swept up by the quirky and charming “An Apology for Trashing Magazines in Which You Appear.” I haven’t encountered a poet like Sealey, who is an advocate for intersectionality and whose work is best described in this very same way. She’s someone I’ll be keeping my eye out for, as she is not only in-tune with the everyday life around her, but is also a kind of reporter on the world of the supernatural, demystifying it and making it accessible by reminding us that

  Even the eyes of gods
  must adjust to light. Even gods have gods.

  (“Even the Gods,” p 54).

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• Poets
  https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/book/ordinary-beast
  Word count: 233

  Ordinary Beast
  Author
  Nicole Sealey
  Publisher
  Ecco
  Year
  2017
  Type
  Poetry Book
  Find on

  IndieBound
  Worldcat
  Ordinary Beast (Ecco, September 2017)
  Ordinary Beast (Ecco, September 2017)
  Printer-friendly version

  reviewed by Stephanie Burt

  Nicole Sealey’s debut feels like a debut, in the best sense: a clever poet with a lot to say will try everything once, or more than once, in order to see what works, from centos, to poems that critique her own earlier poems (“In Defense of ‘Candelabra with Heads’”), to a sestina in which all six end-words are some form of “pit”—“Pity,” “pulpit,” “Eliot Spitzer”) to straightforward first-person reactions, as in one poem set in Nigeria: “The West in me wants the mansion / to last. The African knows it cannot.” Sealey’s repertoire of devices might link her to Paul Muldoon, or to Kathleen Ossip, whose tricky relation to memoir and to public trauma she also shares. Yet nobody will read Sealey for long without seeing her “thoughts turn to black people—/ the hysterical strength we must / possess to survive our very existence.” Some of Sealey’s subjects are black America, gender in performance (a few poems pay homage to drag queens from the documentary Paris Is Burning), love lost, and—in the final poem, an aubade—love kept and found.

• Brooklyn Rail
  https://brooklynrail.org/2017/12/books/ORDINARY-BEAST-NICOLE-SEALEY-with-Alex-Dueben
  Word count: 2430

  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.
  Contributor
  Alex Dueben

  ALEX DEUBEN has written for many publications including The Believer, The Paris Review, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Comics Journal.

• Book Page
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/21928-nicole-sealey-ordinary-beast
  Word count: 370

  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.”

• Miami Rail
  https://miamirail.org/reviews/ordinary-beast-nicole-sealey/
  Word count: 559

  The Defiant Infanta: a review of Chantel Acevedo’s The Living Infinite
  The Black Aesthetic at the Living Room Light Exchange

  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.

• Indiana Review
  https://indianareview.org/2018/02/microreview-nicole-sealeys-ordinary-beast/
  Word count: 719

  MICROREVIEW: NICOLE SEALEY’S ORDINARY BEAST

  Review by Anni Liu

  In Ordinary Beast, Nicole Sealey’s first full-length collection of poetry, she questions how to make something that will last. While it would be easy to say that with these impeccably crafted poems Sealey has answered the question, I believe this poet is less interested in the act of simple preservation than in dancing within the limits of our “brief animation.” One thing that makes this book of myriad forms and ideas feel fresh is its ambivalence about the questions most central to it. Sealey writes:

  The West in me wants the mansion
  to last. The African knows it cannot.

  Everything aspires to one
  degradation or another. I want
  to learn how to make something
  holy, then walk way.

  There are so many things to admire about this book, but its formal innovation and poise come to mind first. In this collection, Sealey uses a variety of forms, from the sonnet to a form of the poet’s own invention called the obverse. Elsewhere, reviewers have tended to read her “playful riffs on pop culture” and “images of racism and violence” as two separate tendencies, but I see these two elements as inseparable from each other. By using sonnets to write from the voices of drag performers, for example, the poet plays with/in the traditional form and acknowledges the constructive and constricting forces history can have on the imagination.

  Relatedly, the investigation of what it means to perceive and create works of art drives her stunning pair of poems triggered by a sculpture made with mannequins by Thomas Hirschhorn called “Candelabra with Heads.” In the first poem, which shares its title with the sculpture, the speaker regards the wrapped up mannequins on their wooden frame: “Had I not brought with me my mind / as it has been made, this thing, / … might be eight infants swaddled and sleeping.” This poem is the invented form called the obverse, which is almost identical to a palindrome poem, which repeats the first half in reverse order for the second half of the poem. The difference is that here, instead of ending with the opening lines, Sealey punctuates the end with a thesis question: “Who can see this and not see lynchings?” Seeing is interpreting, Sealey reminds us, and the imagination is wedded to our awareness of history. The poem is a powerful enactment of this process.

  Later in the book is the poem “in defense of ‘candelabra with heads,'” which relates how the editors of Sealey’s chapbook had advised her to omit the final thesis question from “candelabra.” But now in the full-length collection, the poet decides to add the question back into the poem. She writes: “I ask because the imagination / would have us believe, much like faith, faith / the original “Candelabra” lacks, in things unseen.” Perhaps the real question is why Hirschhorn, the editors, and perhaps the readers don’t see the lynchings, and don’t want to. At the end of this poem, Sealey imagines a reader “a hundred years from now” who will come across the obverse and its thesis question:

  May that lucky someone be black
  and so far removed from the verb lynch that she be
  dumbfounded by its meaning. May she then
  call up Hirschhorn’s Candelabra with Heads.
  May her imagination, not her memory, run wild.

  The tenderness of this imagining strikes me deeply. I think these final lines are also offering up this poet’s ethos of what poetry might be: a testimony of what it is to be alive, and how our lives are shaped–bounded, framed, if only partially so–by our marked identities and their histories. As Sealey herself quotes in “cento for the night I said ‘I love you'”: “How free we are; how bound. Put here in love’s name.”

  Playful, tender, and razor-sharp, Ordinary Beast will be a book I return to again and again.

  February 21, 2018 by Essence London

  Tags: Anni Liu, book review, Candelabra with Heads, form, history, microreview, Nicole Sealey, Ordinary Beast, play, poetry collection, preservation, sculpture, seeing history

• Critical Mass
  http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/leonard-prize-reviews-ordinary-beast-by-nicole-sealey
  Word count: 1041

  Leonard Prize Reviews: ‘Ordinary Beast’ by Nicole Sealey

  by Hamilton Cain | Nov-15-2017

  In November, National Book Critics Circle members will begin nominating and voting for the John Leonard award for the first book in any genre that has been published in the US in 2017. In the run-up to the first round of voting, we'll be posting a series of #NBCCLeonard reviews on promising first books.

  The John Leonard Prize is our annual award based on member nominations and chosen by a panel of member volunteers. Named for the longtime critic and NBCC co-founder, John Leonard, the prize is awarded for the best first book in any genre. Previous winners include: Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), Phil Klay's Redeployment (2014), Kristin Valdez Quade’s Night at the Fiestas (2015), and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016).

  Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey. (Ecco). Reviewed by Hamilton Cain.

  Late in Nicole Sealey’s exhilarating hardcover debut, Ordinary Beast, she writes, with delicious, shrug-of-the-shoulder irony, a two-line ars poetica:

  . . . Yeats said a poem should click shut

  like a well-made box. I don’t disagree.

  Her poems shut and open and shut and open, click upon click, a feedback loop of grace and revelation.

  Born in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Sealey grew up in Apopka, Florida, and earned an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA from New York University. The winner of a slew of prizes, with work published in American Poetry Review and The New Yorker (among others), she is now the executive director at New York’s Cave Canem Foundation.

  Early in her career, Sealey says, she’d “attempted form, but gave up easily.” An eight-week workshop at Cave Canem with the formalist Marilyn Nelson challenged her: “You had no choice but to bring it . . . restrictions allowed me to do things I wouldn’t do.” Ordinary Beast showcases a versatile artist as she plumbs an array of themes -- racial injustice and gender marginalization -- by appropriating forms popularized by dead white guys: Plutarch, Shakespeare, Donne.

  Her variations are vigorous, beguiling. There’s a marvelous double-sestina based on the board game “clue” – the six end words are the last names of the six suspects, Professor Plum, Miss Scarlet, Mrs. Peacock, Colonel Mustard, Mrs. White, and Mr. Green – followed by an “erased” version, “c ue,” which reduces seventy-eight lines to thirty words. There’s an elaborate and gorgeous cento, a form that borrows single lines from other poems and plaits them together, a kind of found art; as Sealey notes, “I mined several hundred books in order to find some lines that sounded like me.” And in a sly vein there’s “underperforming sonnet overperforming,” which follows a Shakespearean scheme (ABAB/CDCD/EFEF/GG) but mimics Donald Trump’s vulgar braggadocio: “This time, this poem, is the best idea/I’ve ever had – the best in history/even, the best any has had , , , “ The concluding couplet provides the kicker, with the final line straight-up iambic pentameter: “this poem is, with enormous success/the only poem entirely imageless.” Here past is married to present: what better way to speak to our backward-looking times?

  It’s crazy fun to read Ordinary Beast as Sealey fires on all cylinders: the playful “unframed,” framed inside a typographical box; the rhetorical twists in “a violence” and “virginia is for lovers;” the haunting trope of the hanging man, featured in the gorgeously associative “candelabra with heads” and its companion piece, “in defense of ‘candelabra with heads,” both poems evoking the rancid history of racial lynching in the South as well as the mysticism of the Tarot: “It is rumored gods grow where the blood of a hanged man drips.”

  But the collection’s crown jewels are a trio of sonnets, dramatic monologues offered by three real-life characters from Jennie Livingston’s outrageous, heart-piercing 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning: Venus Xtravaganza, Pepper Labeija, and Octavia Saint Laurent. All three sonnets are titled “legendary,” alluding to the speakers’ description of themselves as “legendary children” (or “up-and-coming legendary children”), despite the fact they are racial and sexual minorities on the far frontier of society, many molded by their families’ disgust into families of their own. In Harlem’s drag balls of the late 1980s they lived out fantasies as supermodels, wealthy television divas such as Alexis and Krystle Carrington from Dynasty; or even soldiers or sports heroes, reflecting (and satirizing) the hyper-masculine roles foisted on them. Realness.

  As in the documentary, Venus here confesses a yearning for a suburban Leave It to Beaver future with the man of her dreams; Sealey pounds home the harrowing tragedy of Venus’s life by casting “white” as the final incantatory word of each line, with the exception of the final one, which hints darkly at her fate:

  . . . .I want a white

  house in Peekskill, far from the city-white

  picket fence fencing in my lily-white

  lilies. O, were I whiter than white.

  . . . .Whatever else white

  affords, I want. In multiples of white.

  . . . .What I’d like is to be white

  as the unsparing light at tunnel’s end.

  Sealey captures the flamboyant humor and subtle authority of Pepper, in many ways the documentary’s narrative center:

  I hate to brag, but I’m a one-man parade

  Jehovah in drag, the church in a dress.

  Or the lissome, defiant Octavia:

  Only amateurs imagine Harlem

  leads to Hollywood.

  For all their outsider mystique, these poems affirm our humanity from the outside in, as Sealey allows form to levitate her, like a tangle of balloons toward re-invention, realness: “believing a thing as sacred as the sun rises/and falls like an ordinary beast.” Ordinary Beast is a triumph, and we can look forward to future spectacular work from this extravagantly gifted poet.

  A former book editor, Hamilton Cain is the author of This Boy's Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing. (Crown, 2011).

• Mosaic Magazine
  https://mosaicmagazine.org/nicole-sealey-interview/
  Word count: 2211

  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.
  This entry was posted in Interviews and tagged Kyla Marshell, Nicole Sealey, Ordinary Beast, poem, poetry. Bookmark the permalink.

• The Paris Review
  https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/22/every-poem-love-poem-something-interview-nicole-sealey/
  Word count: 2676

  Every Poem Is a Love Poem to Something: An Interview with Nicole Sealey
  By Lauren Kane February 22, 2018
  At Work

  Nicole Sealey’s debut collection, Ordinary Beast, is a stunning compendium of poems in which she reveals herself to be a poet who can move from the deeply personal to the mythic and historic without losing the impact of either. Her poetry belies passionate dedication, executed with grace and a quiet, simmering power. Sealey was born in Saint Thomas, of the United States Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She decided to commit to a career as a poet at age thirty-two, when she began an M.F.A. at NYU. While one should not understate the achievement of Sealey’s first full-length collection with a major publisher, her presence as a formidable poetic voice has been percolating for some time. Her chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, won the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and her accolades beyond that are many. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and others.

  I met Sealey at her office in Brooklyn, where she works as the Executive Director of the Cave Canem Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has for over two decades been committed to supporting African American poets through fellowships, workshops, and a national community hundreds strong. When I arrived, the clean, modern office space was mostly cleared in preparation to host an event the next night, Walking the Walk: Poetry, Equity & Anti-Racism in the Literary Arts, as a part of their ongoing antiracism workshop series. Warm and graceful, she offered me water and we found a quiet conference room to delve into the nuances of Ordinary Beast. Over the course of an hour, we discussed sonnets, love, and how buying an orchid can sometimes be just the thing to complete a poem. She showed me photos of her dining-room table covered in clippings of poetry that she had used to construct one piece in her collection, “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You.’ ” As the pictures suggest, Nicole Sealey is a poet ardently devoted to the craft of poetry, as committed to the organization of a workshop series as she is to the literal construction a masterful cento.

  INTERVIEWER

  When did you start writing poetry?

  SEALEY

  I’ve been writing poetry, specifically, for more than a dozen years. From 2005 to 2010, I participated in workshops through Cave Canem Foundation, led by such poets as Marilyn Nelson, Willie Perdomo, and Patricia Smith, and attended the foundation’s weeklong writing retreat. This training, as it were, at Cave Canem encouraged me to think critically about poetry and seriously about a possible career as poet, which eventually led me to NYU. And, in 2012, at the age thirty-two, I left a job of nearly eight years to write poems full-time, to pursue an M.F.A. The decision was one of only a handful that I’ve made in my life that scared the hell out of me.

  INTERVIEWER

  Was your family a literary one? Were there books around the house when you were growing up?

  SEALEY

  Though my family wasn’t necessarily a literary one, we did have a set of colorful encyclopedias in the house, which helped spark my curiosity about the world. In general, though, reading for fun was a luxury my family couldn’t afford. As a single mom for most of my childhood, my mother worked up to three jobs concurrently. My sister and I really had to help out around the house—my sister, being three years older, even more so—which left little time for literature beyond assigned school readings.

  I came to literature pretty late. I came to literature when I left home to attend college. I was both an Africana Studies and an English major, so I was reading Paula Giddings’s When and Where I Enter and Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa alongside Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. At which point, I was hooked.

  INTERVIEWER

  Tell me about your writing process. What inspires you to pick up a pen and start writing? How do you start, and how do you know a poem is finished?

  SEALEY

  Though the process varies from poem to poem, the common denominators are the pace at which and method by which I write. I write slowly and line by line. If a line isn’t right, I won’t move on until it is. With a poem like “Heretofore Unuttered,” I’d had the first few lines for years before they made their way into a poem. I was so taken with the lines that I’d just stare at them for hours each day for many months. It wasn’t until I bought an orchid for my writing desk, did the lines come alive and lead me to a breakthrough. The orchid ended up being both the triggering image and a fixture in the poem. Though I didn’t know it at the time of writing, I’m now convinced that “Heretofore Unuttered” is inspired by Matthew Olzmann’s “The Days” and Li-Young Lee’s “One Heart,” both of which are short lyrical poems that speak to the idea of destiny. So, in this case—and in most cases)—reading inspires me to pick up a pen and start writing.

  When do I know a poem is finished? I’m among those who believe a work is never finished, only abandoned.

  INTERVIEWER

  The collection displays such a variety of forms. Is there a form you have that’s a favorite?

  SEALEY

  The sonnet might be my favorite—its fourteen, ten-beat lines and rigid rhyme scheme demands that the most tangential poet cut to the chase. The form requires that I be deliberate, which is something I aspire to in my work. As you know, sonnets drive the “Legendary” series in Ordinary Beast. The form’s history and perceived sophistication partly provides the grace and dignity I’d first imagined for these poems, honoring the artists featured in the seminal, though problematic, documentary film Paris Is Burning about “drag” pageants in 1980s Harlem.

  INTERVIEWER

  So when you sit down to write a poem you know, in a way, going forward what you want it to look like?

  SEALEY

  Yeah, I usually know going in what I’d like poems to look like. Those initial visions, however, almost always change as poems progress. I’d envisioned the “Legendary” series as strict Shakespearean sonnets, for example, but the poems had other plans. The series is comprised entirely of slant Shakespearean sonnets, one of which does away entirely with the traditional rhyme scheme. And, originally, I’d envisioned writing six “Clue” sestinas, each accusing a different character of the murder of Mr. Boddy. After writing the second installment, I soon realized that six would be overkill—pun not intended—and one alternate ending was enough.

  INTERVIEWER

  How do you know a poem is finished?

  SEALEY

  Again, I’m in the camp of never finished, only abandoned. That said, when I start overly revising, and those revisions make the poem less moving, I make myself stop.

  INTERVIEWER

  “Underperforming Sonnet” is a smart, funny poem about the writing process. What do you think of writing about writing?

  SEALEY

  Writers write about everything—from our obsessions to our professions. It’s only natural that we write about writing. Plus, ars poeticas, writings that examine the art of poetry, have been around for thousands of years, an early example of which was written by the Roman poet Horace. “Underperforming Sonnet Overperforming” is an ars poetica, a poetic response to the idea of “ending on an image” as a hard-and-fast rule. I don’t know if I believe in hard-and-fast rules in general, much less poetry.

  INTERVIEWER

  “Object Permanence” is a beautiful love poem and, I think, a highlight of the collection. What’s your experience of writing love poems?

  SEALEY

  Thanks—that’s kind of you to say. My husband, for whom the poem was written, feels the same way, but I think he’s biased.

  “Object Permanence” opens with lovers waking—there first impulse being to make sure the other is still there. In thinking about her relationship with her beloved, the speaker is reminded that there was a time, before they ever knew the other existed, when they were apart and, in death, such a time will come again. The speaker in “Object Permanence” and the speaker in “In Igboland” are similar in this way, in that they understand that nothing is forever. That, indeed, everything aspires to one degradation or another. Even love.

  My experience writing love poems is not unlike my experience writing other poems—a wholly unique experience unto itself. I don’t set out to write love poems specifically, though. I believe every poem is a love poem to something.

  INTERVIEWER

  The perspectives from which your poems are written are almost as varied as the forms. You write from a wide range of narrative viewpoints.

  SEALEY

  That’s right, I do write from a range of viewpoints—I enjoy the urgency of the “you” and the intimacy of the “I,” which is why I especially enjoy writing persona poems. The “Legendary” series is all persona. Writing persona, for me, is an exercise in craft, how to put into words another’s humanity, and also an exercise in empathy, understanding another’s humanity.

  INTERVIEWER

  In “Defense of ‘Candelabra with Heads,’ ” at the end, there’s a young black woman at some point in the future who has to look up the word lynch, and the poem reads, “May her imagination, not her memory, run wild.” This person who’s so far removed from the word that she has to look it up—is that a person that you believe is in the near future?

  SEALEY

  While on one hand, I trust that my descendants will know the history of this country well enough to know the race-based injuries and injustices suffered by their ancestors. On the other, I hope they themselves, the generation before them, the generation before that, and the generation before that have no such point of immediate reference, only a genuine curiosity for what came before.

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you think poetry plays a big role in moving toward that future?

  SEALEY

  I’m wagering poetry has and will continue to play a significant role in the creation of just societies. How could a reader not be moved to introspection, to action in service of justice by poems like Ansel Elkins’s “Reverse: A Lynching”? The first few lines of which read, “Return the tree, the moon, the naked man / Hanging from the indifferent branch / Return blood to his brain, breath to his heart / Reunite the neck with the bridge of his body / Untie the knot, undo the noose / Return the kicking feet to ground / Unwhisper the word jesus.”

  INTERVIEWER

  “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You,’ ” is a beautiful poem of homage, using lines from poems by such a stunning range of poets, from Rilke to Tracy K. Smith. What was the experience of putting it together?

  SEALEY

  “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You’ ” took 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 comprise a hundred different lines by a hundred ethnically diverse poets, of which only fifty percent could identify as male.

  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, like getting the poem from point A to point B.

  INTERVIEWER

  “Even the Gods” is a poem that stands out as an amalgamation of different kinds of religious ideas, from, classical to Christian, or even just a nondenominational, very human relationship to the idea of a God. How does religion play into your poems?

  SEALEY

  Religion plays into my work the same as race and sexuality and gender and myth and history and embodiment. These subjects are my obsessions and, as such, are omnipresent in Ordinary Beast. “Even the Gods,” then, not only questions a seemingly oppressive religious dynamic between the gods and their devout worshipper, it also questions internalized oppressions that seek to undermine one’s favorable sense of self. In this poem, the speaker argues that the gods are no better than their worshipper, which is a metaphor for equality in general. “Even the eyes of gods / must adjust to light. Even gods have gods.”

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you have a favorite poem in the collection?

  SEALEY

  If I had to choose, today my favorite is “Object Permanence.” Yesterday, my favorite was “The First Person Who Will Live to be One Hundred and Fifty Years Old Has Already Been Born.” And, if you were to ask me tomorrow, it’d be different still.

  Lauren Kane works at The Paris Review.

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  Ordinary Beast

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