Patty Seyburn You should have known I’d return. My letters to you always embraced the left margin, the page’s West where the golden apples grew – yes, yes, those same apples Atalanta gathered up while she ran against her suitor, Hippomenes and in losing, poor virgin, lost herself to marriage. I am a better loser: a mediocre huntress, at best, at ease with chronology – step, step – one leads to the next. In the tick-tock...

Our May Issue features two new poems by Patty Seyburn, including, "What Is Best."

Patty Seyburn Miss Dickinson’s were a must-have: complex like soufflés, souls or casseroles, no simple assemblage of milk, sugar, cornstarch and you stir and stir until veins paint your arm with ardor and tedium. It will get viscous and boil, the bubbles voluptuous, reluctant. Result is not the paradigm at work here – you could have bought pudding, saving yourself time for art. Take preventative measures (plastic wrap) or a skin...

Suffering and poetic inspiration are complex traveling companions. Some poets rise out of inflicted harshness and physical deprivation. Inversely, physical comfort can deepen a writer’s sense of poetic urgency. We have proof of the latter in Patty Seyburn’s third title, Hilarity.