Drinking Girls and their Dresses

Heather Sellers

The poems in this book tell a story set in a Florida both lush and oppressive, where similar paradoxes confront the child who would be both open to everything and permanently safe. The girl-body’s relationship to otherness—the masculine, but also the overpowering natural world—as it is distracted by desire plays a key role in these slant, crackly, truly original poems.

“If you love poetry you can see, smell, taste, hear, and feel, then you will love the luscious poems in this collection. Heather Sellers’s lines have the cadence of a chant, and there is some serious voodoo going on here, some magic incantations about being a girl, a woman, a human being in a scary, beautiful world.” —Barbara Hamby

“Heather Sellers’s poems take us back—where?—to the first taste of our whereness, the fresh instant click of yes, that, or no, absolutely not, it was this and this and this. Be careful. These poems can be wonderfully dangerous: jumpy, radiant.” —Marianne Boruch

Heather Sellers was born in Orlando, Florida, and received her Ph.D. from Florida State University in 1992. Recipient of an NEA grant for fiction writing in 2001, she is also the author of Georgia Underwater, a collection of short stories, which won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award. Her first children’s book, Spike and Cubby: Ice Cream Island Adventure! is forthcoming from Henry Holt. Sellers lives in Holland, Michigan, where she raises Pembroke Welsh corgis.

A sample poem from the book

Encounter

I heard a fly buzz when I got

married. I heard a song playing lyrics

I will always know the way you know

something right after it is said.

He says I remind him of Piltdown girl.

That hurts like hogwash. I take it with a tumbler

of salt. She’s fake! Not even a girl, you know.

My car needs new brakes. My house needs

New light. My tub is like your love is, over-

flowing. It’s a long way down. Everyone

knows how to cry. It's a long way to

your ear. This is why we got married,

We need ears to lick, ears to reflect our noses and

we need palms to press, cash to flash. A boy has

a certain smell and he gets hungry for cookies,

too! The complete package. We need this bliss of

Not-thinking, the stupor of oneness. Marriage is stupor elevated.

I always thought I would just marry Florida, or maybe

a state of mind. Flesh comes as a surprise, your crazy

needles (I remind you of Piltdown girl?) kip and

Keep me. Okay. The sun is strong after the

wedding. You sleep in our bed in the shape

of a K. I wander around the downstairs

hungry and homesick. The dog has written his own

Vows. We confer on the back steps, two

breaths on the stoop, the door open wide.

The dog has written in a lot of walking.

I have to give this pause, I say. What I see

On my wedding day: in our garden, and I must

add, in the select garden next door to us, the hyacinths, hard

knobs of wet silk, black and stinky. The snails are

smart. Cloak, and eat. The snails are making themselves

Into plump shiny awnings over all these awesome back-door deaths.