Pat Riviere-Seel

Pat’s latest collection, Because I Did Not Drown, can now be pre-ordered from Main Street Rag.

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 Se

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

When There Were Horses, is now available from Main Street Rag.

These poems come from a poet at the height of her powers, able to swim into deep pools of the senses and the deeper pools of understanding, subtle and complex as multiple ripples spreading and rebounding on the surface of a pond. These are poems to come for the pure pleasure in words and rhythms and play, then return again and again, for the intimate whisperings of a truer life under the surfaces of things.
—Marjorie Hudson, author of Accidental Birds of the Carolinas

Nothing Below But Air, published in March, 2014 by Main Street Rag, is a full length collection in four sections that explores connections between the inner and outer world of the poet. The cover art is from a painting by Chrys Riviere-Blalock, my first cousin. It is our first collaboration.

Poet Fred Chappell says, “only the faint-hearted could resist these poems,” and certainly I cannot. They dare take us into the territory of love and desire, past loves and a wild nature the poet listens to and celebrates like a “summons from a savage world.” Delving into the territory of madness and connection, mountain bears and she-cats, wild flings and married love, feminine identity and survival, Riviere-Seel looks at her life through the sharply focused lens of a woman older and wiser, but still drawn to the wild heart of things. Balanced with contemplative poems that explore communes and yoga, meditation and prayer, this poet’s first full-length collection is an exhilarating plunge into the world of the body and spirit. —Marjorie Hudson author of Searching for Virginia Dare and Accidental Birds of the Carolinas

The Serial Killer’s Daughter won the NC Literary and Historical Society’s 2009 Roanoke-Chowan Award for poetry. The manuscript was a finalist in the Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest. These poems arise from reported and actual events from the life and execution of Velma Barfield. Velma, from eastern NC, was convicted in 1978 of first degree murder in the poisoning death of her fiancé. She confessed to poisoning at least three others who died, including her mother. When she was executed in November 1984 in Raleigh NC, her survivors included a daughter, a son, and three grandchildren. Although based on factual and reported information, the poems, like all poems, are works of imagination.

Pat Riviere-Seel’s The Serial Killer’s Daughter lays a heavy burden on its reader: a burden that asks the reader to hold the tension between the emotions of anger and desire for vengeance and the emotions of pity and compassion. Merging her experience as a newspaper reporter with her esteemed poetic skill, Riviere-Seel has transformed a journalistic sensation into a work of terrible beauty. This book moves us all, in the end, toward an unknowable continent, which is, perhaps, the human heart in all its vast complexities. —Cathy Smith Bowers