"The crinkled gingko leaf shifts like a cricket for a moment before succumbing to stillness. Each imagined boat on the harbor of a well-lit memory is still, just as I sit quietly long enough to maybe feel finished, like him. One pinprick is a seashell, becoming water from a point, and still the shadows grow across some distant prairie, absent each of us."

 — Matthew Landrum, Structo Poetry Editor

​

Praise

The ten poems in Christina Seymour’s debut chapbook, Flowers Around Your Soft Throat, raise everyday suburban life to the level of the sublime [. . .]

The sonic unity in Seymour’s free verse comes from within-line rhyming and alliteration. Hard sounds are balanced out by sibilance in a snippet like “cicadas send clicks,” while the four-fold assonance in “a parade of brave raindrops on the pane” augments the internal rhyme to produce an enchanting rhythm in “Hope Naturally Follows Morning.”

​

Here Seymour gilds autobiographical fragments with universal significance. She leads a breathtaking emotional tour [. . .] Family and romantic relationships provide succor yet are always a potential locus of sadness. Nature and art, the poet proposes, are methods of transmuting this inevitable grief: “We ask any surprise rain shower to teach us how to weep” as we recognize “the tiptoed silk of a relative dying.” Readers will be eager to encounter Seymour’s fresh images and ekphrasis in a full-length collection. ​

 — Rebecca Foster, Small Press Book Review; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Full review here.

​