Blue Opening by Chet'la Sebree
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 PEN/VOELCKER AWARD FOR POETRY
“A profound poetic talent.”—Ada Limón
- Sale Date
- ISBN
- 9781963108460
- Page Count
- 96
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 6 x 9
- Imprint
- Tin House
Meet the Author
Chet'la Sebree
Longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Poetry Finalist
“A profound poetic talent.”—Ada Limón
Blue Opening, 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.
With startling clarity and vivid tenderness, Blue Opening 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.”
Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Poetry Finalist
“A profound poetic talent.”—Ada Limón
Blue Opening, 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.
With startling clarity and vivid tenderness, Blue Opening 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.”
Praise for Blue Opening
-
“Poems of formal brilliance and magma-hot emotionalism.”
The Driftless Area Review"These poems wrestle with the cosmic without losing sight of the personal. . . . Wistful yet undaunted, this collection forges new beginnings out of elegy." —Publishers Weekly -
“Magnificently connects the corporeal to the universal.”
Largehearted Boy, A Favorite Poetry Collection of 2025 "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, Blue Opening is an intimate and needed record. Sensuous and deft. Exquisitely made: ‘hulling, from blue rock, faith." —Aracelis Girmay, editor of So We Can Know"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. Blue Opening 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." —Yona Harvey, author of You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love"Blue Opening is 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 Blue Opening 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." —Anthony Cody, author of The Rendering"A rare and auspicious gift." —Ama Codjoe, author of Bluest Nude: Poems
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