Undersea

Undersea is Seaton's free-wheeling series of love notes to her transplanted sea-struck self and her salty poems that celebrate her signature wit and joy in that wild state of mind, Florida. These are poems of family, love, and longing for life itself. Undersea is a novella in poems.

Told with her singular wit and wisdom honed by salt and sun and brine, the poems are besotted with Florida-its superhero pelicans, the rum-macerated retirees baking in the sun, the soundtrack of air-conditioning, and a lover's night terrors playing in an oceanside efficiency. The speaker in these poems is love-laden but clear-eyed, sure that "there is no line between water and sky," the perfect "stark raving" guide for the reader eager to "...proceed until the edge of the cave / or run out of air, whichever comes first."

-Caridad Moro-Gronlier, author of Tortillera

Reading Maureen Seaton's poems has always been a kind of astral projection for me. Reading Undersea, I was flung loose from my body so many times, sailing across the Sunshine State on a cloud of sensuous imagery. In Seaton's rendering of this land we love, "Avocados/fall like big and little bombs," "egrets grow fat on curly fries," and "there is no line between water and sky." Come for the "gibbous moonlight," the "canny pelicans," a "speedboat full of gangsters." Stay for the long-won wisdom of the poet herself, who hearkens Blake's imperative to "see the world in a grain of sand"-literally and figuratively, too. Seaton is the glass and the salt, the sling and the shot, "the blue ineffable" that lingers beyond her most luminous feats of language.⠀

-Julie Marie Wade, author of Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing and Six: Poems