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Blue Opening: Poems
Blue Opening, Chet'la Sebree's brilliant, illuminating poetry collection, grapples with origins--of illness, of language, of the universe--as the speaker contemplates whether she, too, can be a site of origin through motherhood. Navigating chronic health challenges alongside grief and questions about the nature of knowledge and religion, she searches personal history and the cosmos for answers to the unknowable.
With startling clarity and vivid tenderness, Blue Opening calls into question not only where to begin, but how to create, across thirty-two poems that press the fluid boundaries of form through sonnets, prose poems, odes, and two unforgettable poetic sequences. As the speaker traverses loss, possibility, and the choice, or often the lack of choice, in the direction of her future, she determines to press forward even as she is "unsure of what shape this language should take / and hulling, from blue rock, faith."
Book Details
- Publisher: Tin House Books
- Publish Date: Sep 16th, 2025
- Pages: 96
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.10in - 6.20in - 0.40in - 0.30lb
- EAN: 9781963108460
- Categories: • American - African American & Black• Subjects & Themes - Death, Grief, Loss• Subjects & Themes - Family
About the Author
Sebree, Chet'la: - Chet'la Sebree is the author of Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress. Raised in the mid-Atlantic, she earned an MFA in creative writing, with a focus in poetry, from American University. Chet'la's poetry and prose have appeared in Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, Pleiades, Guernica, Poetry International, and The Yale Review. Currently, Chet'la is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College. Her debut essay collection is forthcoming from The Dial Press in 2026.
Praise for this book
These poems wrestle with the cosmic without losing sight of the personal.... Wistful yet undaunted, this collection forges new beginnings out of elegy.-- "Publishers Weekly"
A rare and auspicious gift.--Ama Codjoe Bluest Nude: Poems
These formally various poems are made in the 'body's vernacular.' Cellular, full of becomings and endings, alert toward 'the arrival of the infinite: ' Chet'la Sebree's language becomes a strand of desire, a string of scream. Taking up questions of Black maternity, illness, desire, and grief, Blue Opening is an intimate and needed record. Sensuous and deft. Exquisitely made: 'hulling, from blue rock, faith.--Aracelis Girmay, editor of So We Can Know
This book moves with measured, meticulous, and tender interiority. Each poem investigates what it means to grieve both the ancestral beloved and the not-yet-born. Blue Opening skillfully navigates the challenges of wanting 'the truth to sound poetic' while acknowledging the piercing realities and 'root logic' of womb, breast, brain, and heart. These verses do not shy from disappointment and regret. But the body does not exist here as failure, even with its limitations. On the contrary, this book offers gentle yet startling and philosophical contemplations of creation and origin, and an unapologetic longing to be a mother.--Yona Harvey, author of You Don't Have to Go to Mars for Love
Blue Opening is a source energy, an essential tincture, and an unrelenting examination into the depths of ache, faith, mortality, and the cosmos. In this expansively concise collection, Chet'la Sebree deploys a tender and inventive poetics of dexterous inquiry to transmute life's vastness toward a constellation of possibilities and care. Sebree is unafraid to give voice to elusive truths on the page, acknowledging, 'Here, I can unlearn everything I've been taught, begin to accept things as they are.' Fully embracing uncertainty, Sebree is prismatic, refracting Blue Opening into a luminous knowing, for she affirms, 'In matrilineal suffering, I know healing begins with me.' In this book, from the seams to the unseeming, Sebree affixes a new forward for all that days that follow.--Anthony Cody, author of The Rendering