Hilarity

$15.00 paper | 75 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-930974-83-8
Publication Date: April 2009
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Winner of the 2008 Green Rose Prize

“In a time when there’s little to laugh about, Patty Seyburn’s Hilarity is an epic punch line: sparkling and smart. I rely on her ‘sort of music eliding joy and pain’ —and the echoes in the great church of disbelief to keep us all sane and savvy. Read Hilarity and weep, and laugh. And get better because of it.”
—Carol Muske-Dukes

“Patty Seyburn’s Hilarity is a skeptic’s playground, in which we learn that Dante ‘layered Hell like a taco salad,’ that God created the ocean with waves ‘in tiers’ instead of vertical, and an escaping butterfly triggers the rhyme of ‘reason’ with ‘treason.’ Seyburn is also mistress of nocturnal phantasmagoria, in a series of insomnia and dream and nightmare poems that dredge ‘the silt and mud of memory.’ Is she also, however, a closet romantic? You will have to read the seven poker-faced ‘chapters’ of the title poem to find out.”
—Alicia Ostriker

Patty Seyburn

Patty Seyburn’s third book of poems, Hilarity, won the Green Rose Prize given by New Issues Poetry & Prose. She has published two books of poems:Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) andDiasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998) which won the 1997 Marianne Moore Poetry Prize and the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award for 2000. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Paris Review, New England Review, Field, Slate, Crazyhorse, Cutbank, Quarterly West, Bellingham Review, Connecticut Review, Cimarron Review, Third Coast and Western Humanities Review. Seyburn grew up in Detroit, earned a BS and an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University, an MFA in Poetry from University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Poetry and Literature from the University of Houston. She is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach and co-editor of POOL: A Journal of Poetry, based in Los Angeles. She lives with her husband, Eric Little, and their two children, Sydney and Will.