Chet'la Sebree — Blue Opening - with Thea Brown

<p><em><strong>Blue Opening</strong></em>, 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.</p><p>With startling clarity and vivid tenderness, <em>Blue Opening</em> 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 &quot;unsure of what shape this language should take / and hulling, from blue rock, faith.&quot;</p><p><strong>Chet'la Sebree</strong>  is the author of the poetry collections <em>Blue Opening </em>(Tin House),  <em>Field Study</em>, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and <em>Mistress</em>. 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 <em>Colorado Review, Kenyon Review</em>, Lit Hub, <em>Pleiades, Guernica, Poetry International</em>, and <em>The Yale Review</em>. 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.</p><p>Sebree is in conversation with <strong>Thea Brown</strong>, is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently <em>Loner Forensics</em> (Northwestern University Press 2023). Her poems can be found in <em>Action, Spectacle</em>, <em>Bennington Review</em>, <em>River Styx</em>, <em>Oversound</em>, <em>Iowa Review</em>, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore and teaches creative writing at the George Washington University.</p><p>https://politics-prose.com/book/9781963108460?ic_referral=zmZ-XtJUOSA8I1Wx6aWfYJGLzQRJkF_NNCC-CptW2V4wMzfs-o1MWmEyRMlCCYHPD9LO7wbJvNNVLvA-w6PkIUDdj4kO2mTNA5BDL7fkg1RQ79kuqiYQ_gl_LZ1EJMELEHHvOrc</p>