{"product_id":"blue-opening-isbn-9781963108460","title":"Blue Opening","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eLonglisted for the 2026 PEN\/Voelcker Award for Poetry \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e Book Prizes Poetry Finalist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A profound poetic talent.”—Ada Limón\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBlue Opening\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith startling clarity and vivid tenderness, \u003ci\u003eBlue Opening\u003c\/i\u003e 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.”\"These poems wrestle with the cosmic without losing sight of the personal…. Wistful yet undaunted, this collection forges new beginnings out of elegy.\"—\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Magnificently connects the corporeal to the universal.”—\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLargehearted Boy\u003c\/i\u003e, A Favorite Poetry Collection of 2025\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e  \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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, \u003ci\u003eBlue Opening \u003c\/i\u003eis an intimate and needed record. Sensuous and deft. Exquisitely made: ‘hulling, from blue rock, faith.\" —\u003cb\u003eAracelis Girmay, editor of \u003ci\u003eSo We Can Know\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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. \u003ci\u003eBlue Opening\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\" —\u003cb\u003eYona Harvey, author of \u003ci\u003eYou Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"Blue Opening \u003c\/i\u003eis 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 \u003ci\u003eBlue Opening\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\" —\u003cb\u003eAnthony Cody, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Rendering\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA rare and auspicious gift.—Ama Codjoe Bluest Nude: Poems\u003cb\u003eChet'la Sebree\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of \u003ci\u003eField Study\u003c\/i\u003e, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and \u003ci\u003eMistress\u003c\/i\u003e. 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 \u003ci\u003eColorado Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eKenyon Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLit Hub\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePleiades\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eGuernica\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePoetry International\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Yale Review\u003c\/i\u003e. 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.","brand":"Tin House","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48232992145637,"sku":"NP9781963108460","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781963108460.jpg?v=1767722848","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/blue-opening-isbn-9781963108460","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}