Pat Riviere-Seel

BECAUSE I DID NOT DROWN

Poetry and Essays by Pat Riviere-Seel

My life has always been a balancing act, a lot like crossing a river by stepping on rocks, moving from one to the next without falling. The trick is to keep moving. Too often I’ve tried to steady myself on one rock before moving on to the next. I’ve found some balance, but more importantly, I learned to swim by slipping and tumbling into the water.

If I were to choose only one word to describe my life, it would be resilience. I didn’t drown. I found possibilities.

As I began to reflect on how the Covid Pandemic had changed me, how I had changed, and what was important to me, I found myself writing both prose and poetry. Writing in both genres, and pairing poems with prose, I discovered a balance of possibilities.

These stepping stones into my life are a few of my stories.

Now they are your stories.

—Pat Riviere-Seel

Pat Riviere-Seel’s latest volume, Because I Did Not Drown, is a provocative, courageous, beautiful contemplation – powerful, elegant poems interspersed with powerful, elegant personal essays – on the fragility of life and the inextinguishable indomitability of the human heart and spirit to cling to it in face of often withering challenges. The yield is extraordinary: an inspired montage that takes on, with breathtaking candor and insight, the sublime daily triumph of “a woman made of water and fire” drawing breath.
—Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14), author of Light at the Seam

Pat Riviere-Seel’s Because I Did Not Drown is a powerful mix of personal essay and poetry. Already renown for her poetry, Riviere-Seel’s essays were an exciting surprise. This book is about substance. If there are secrets in us all, Riviere-Seel unfurls the beauty and grace of revelation. This book offers the soft underbelly of the public self in a way that made me honored to be allowed to read it.
—Beverly A. Jackson, author of Loose Fish (memoir), Every Burning Thing (poetry), and visual artist

What a challenge to stay present even during moments that shout pay attention and a triumph to tend to quieter times mindfully. In Because I Did Not Drown, Pat Riviere-Seel does both. The opening poem, From the “Almanac of Broken Things” begins, I choose this Earth that breaks/my heart again and again. This feat of embracing love and its twin grief rivers through this brave, beautiful book, and I was happy to be swept along. It’s no surprise the word friend(s) recurs more often than most. Riviere-Seel has built community wherever she goes, including within this book, where the reader along for the ride discovers they too are part of her community.
—Malaika King Albrecht, editor of Redheaded Stepchild, and the poetry collection, The Stumble Fields