Heather Sellers delves into the intricate landscapes of the human mind, exploring the fluid boundaries between perception and reality. Her writing is characterized by a keen psychological insight and a lyrical prose that draws readers into the inner lives of her characters. Through her work, Sellers often challenges assumptions, revealing the hidden truths that lie beneath the surface of everyday existence. Her narrative style is both intimate and unsettling, leaving a lasting impression on the reader.
Winner of the 2020 Blue Lynx Prize for PoetryIn The Present State of the Garden, both childhood and the natural world are elegized as the speaker works through layers of the dissolution of a marriage and a world on the brink of ecological collapse. She attempts to patch together some kind of new Eden in these aftermaths and to make a home and family from the remnants―memories from girlhood, a stray aunt and a niece, and what's left of her small, once lush garden after the punishing storms of summer. The Present State of the Garden is a clear-eyed, open-hearted poetic memoir.
Drawn from daily observations, Heather Sellers's poems ponder the changing Florida Coast as the population swells and the waters rise.From the frontlines of climate catastrophe, a poet watches the sea approach her doorstep.Born and raised in Florida, Heather Sellers grew up in an extraordinarily difficult home. The natural world provided a life-giving respite from domestic violence. She found, in the tropical flora and fauna, great beauty and meaningful connection. She made her way by trying to learn the name of every flower, every insect, every fish and shell and tree she encountered.That world no longer exists.In this collection of poems, Sellers laments its loss, while observing, over the course of a year, daily life of the people and other animals around her, on her street, and in her low-lying coastal town, where new high rises soar into the sky as the storm clouds gather with increasing intensity and the future of the community—and seemingly life as we know it—becomes more and more uncertain.Sprung from her daily observation journals, haunted by ghosts from the past, Field Notes from the Flood Zone is a double love letter: to a beautiful and fragile landscape, and to the vulnerable young girl who grew up in that world. It is an elegy for the two great shaping forces in a life, heartbreaking family struggle and a collective lost treasure, our stunning, singular, desecrated Florida, and all its remnant beauty.
