Seed Celestial is the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, selected by Eileen Myles; the poems in this debut collection consider societal issues, mythological origins, and the capacity for hope in the face of uncertain futures.
Bringing together contemporary issues of climate change, gun violence, immigration, and feminism, Sara R. Burnett writes haunting reflections on origins—of myth and memory, language and country, earth and mothers. While working from her own experience of raising children, she writes, ''You were inside my body / while I was outside; / outside was everything else.'' Burnett vividly renders her own origin story as an immigrant’s daughter through the myth of Demeter and Persephone.
This book is a love letter to the earth the way only a mother can write it: appreciating all its faults while seeing its beauty. Burnett offers a poetry collection that is tender and honest, akin to having an intimate conversation with a friend who tells us what we know to be true about ourselves, our twin capacities for love and violence, and what we don’t. She intertwines our violent, complicated world with the uncanny human capacity for hope and describes the awe of a world recreating itself again and again while wondering about all we lose and leave behind, especially for the next generation.