Rebecca Seiferle

Rebecca Seiferle is an American poet.

Life

Seiferle has a BA from the University of the State of New York with a major in English and History, and a minor in Art History. In 1989, she received her MFA from Warren Wilson College.

She taught English and creative writing for a number of years at San Juan College and has taught at the Provincetown Fine Arts Center, Key West Literary Seminar, Port Townsend Writers Conference, Gemini Ink, the Stonecoast MFA program She has been poet-in-residence at Brandeis University.

She has regularly reviewed for The Harvard Review and Calyx , and her work has appeared in Partisan Review, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Carolina Quarterly. She is editor of The Drunken Boat.

She lives with her family in Tucson, Arizona

Awards

Her first book, The Ripped-Out Seam won the Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Writers' Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, and the National Writers' Union Prize, and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize.

Her second collection, The Music We Dance To (Sheep Meadow 1999) won the 1998 Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her third poetry collection, Bitters, published by Copper Canyon Press, won the Western States Book Award and a Pushcart prize. Her translation of Vallejo's Trilce was a finalist for the 1992 PenWest Translation Award.

In 2004, she was awarded a literary fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.

Works

• THE CUSTOM; HOW TO SPEAK IN BABYLON; DOCUMENTARIES; THE RIPPED-OUT SEAM, wisewomensweb
• "Law of Inertia", pif Magazine
• "The Relic". Ploughshares. Fall 1991. http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmArticleID=7243. 
• "A Broken Crown of Sonnets for My Father's Forehead". the sonnet scroll i (The Poetry Porch). 1999. http://www.poetryporch.com/scroll99.html#rs. 
• "Angel Fire; Widow's Mite; The Price of Books; Seraphim; Proviso". Arbutus. April 2008. http://www.arbutus.net/poetry/rebeccaseiferle.htm. 
• "Room of Dust", Santa Fe Poetry Broadside, Issue #11, September, 1999
• The Gift, Copper Canyon Press (2001)

Poetry

• The Ripped-Out Seam. The Sheep Meadow Press. 1993. ISBN 9781878818225. 
• The Music We Dance To. The Sheep Meadow. 1999. ISBN 9781878818768. 
• Bitters. Copper Canyon Press. 2001. ISBN 9781556591686. 
• Wild Tongue. Copper Canyon Press. 2007. ISBN 9781556592621. 

Translations

• César Vallejo (2003). The Black Heralds. Copper Canyon Press. ISBN 9781556591990. 
• Trilce, César Vallejo, Sheep Meadow Press 1992

Anthologies

• Best American Poetry 2000, Scribner's, ISBN 9780684842813
• Erin Belieu, Susan Aizenberg, ed. (2001). "Rebecca Seiferle". The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women. Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231119634. http://books.google.com/?id=1MHyK2rGcYEC&pg=PA341&dq=Rebecca+Seiferle. 
• Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon Press 2002), translations of Alfonso D'Aquino and Ernesto Lumbreras
• Saludos: Poemas de Nuevo Mexico, Pennywhistle Press
• New Mexico Poetry Renaissance, edited by Miriam Sagan and Sharon Neiderman, Red Crane Press, ISBN 9781878610416
• The Sheep Meadow Anthology.
• Pushcart Prize XXVII, Pushcart Press, 2003, ISBN 9781888889352

Reviews

It's one of those inexplicable moments where you are at a loss for words and the simple task before you remains undone: Write up a book review. But it can't be done when you have the magnitude of the river pressing down on you. It occurs to you, that is exactly how one goes about describing The Ripped Out Seam by Rebecca Seiferle. Her poems run by, at you in torrents, in a rush of words, rapid and seething. One single word tossed into the river ripples across the surface and sinks in deeply. But that's not where it settles. It's dug up again, tossed around, turned over and scrutinized until it takes on the shape and properties of stone, a rock, leaving a wound where a word was dug out. The book itself, a seamless river of stones, reader beware.

External links

• "Interview to Rebecca Seiferle", Anny Ballardini, fieralingue
• "Interview with Rebecca Seiferle", Cervena Barva Press