We're thrilled to welcome Chet'la in conversation with local poet Anne Poarch in the store!
About the Book:
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.”
About the Authors:
Chet'la Sebree is the author of Blue Opening, forthcoming from Tin House in September 2025. She is also the author of Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry (2020). Her debut essay collection turn (w)here: a geography of home is forthcoming from The Dial Press in 2026.
Anne Poarch is the Director of Advancement for Capital Trees and a Richmond-based author and entrepreneur. Her two books of nature-based poetry, Flight: of butterflies and robins and other winged dreams (2017) and The Grit & Joy of Being (2019), were both published by local press Belle Isle Books, and round out a creative drive for authenticity and communing with our natural world. In 2016 Anne founded BASKET & BIKE, and in 2025 has introduced WANDER & WALK, leisurely bicycle and walking excursions in nature and along the avenues of Richmond.
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