Seed
“The poems in Seed are luminous and intimate. With emotional clarity that surprises and enriches, David Eye has crafted a debut that illuminates how queerness shapes and shelters the self. His lines are elegant, exact, and rich with both joy and sorrow. This is beautiful and bracing work.”
—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning
Selected by award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral for The Word Works 2017 Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Available for purchase at The Word Works, Small Press Distribution, or Amazon.
“The poems of . . . ‘Seed’ remind us to breathe, to sit inside the shimmering, heartbreaking moment, to stop and wonder and laugh. . . . Discovery occurs and recurs in the act of turning inward to view a past, to understand the instant when everything changed, to open and examine and somehow make peace. ‘Seed’ reveals how beginnings are intricate, how journeys are remembered by what lay underfoot—’the sweet, sharp scent of sun on dry needles’—and how we return from the wondrous, reckless place where we began.”
—Karin Cecile Davidson, from “There Must Have Been Words Once:
An Interview with David Eye,” Newfound, Vo. 8, Issue 2, Fall 2017
“Eye has a remarkable gift for natural description; he mixes a captivating lyricism with darker tones of realism. The standout poems . . . are beautiful depictions of the natural world that contain a well-drawn, painterly sensibility. . . . There are elements of innocence and naiveté in Eye’s verse, but they are always mixed with a sharper knowledge. . . . Eye gives us the surprising and varied complexity of human relationships. . . . The title of this collection directs us toward beginnings and origins, toward sex, procreation and those forces which guide us to maturity. Eye accomplishes a canny mix of tender and harsh imagery. . . . His language is always magically fresh and alive, and his tone ever compassionate.”
—Walter Holland, from the review on Lambda Literary, May 2018
“…Seed is the seed of trees and paper, sex and procreation. His poems flourish with observation and compassion. He takes us from farm animals and rattlesnakes in West Virginia to New York City buses and subway lines to a bar in Florence. Through his longing for family and children, his empathetic connection to the world’s joys and unspeakable despair, he honors survival and humanity in sonnets and prose poems, in villanelles and free verse wonders. Seed is a stunning debut.”
—Denise Duhamel, author of Scald
“David Eye’s poems remind me that nuance and candor are stronger in a writer, and in a friend, when they appear together, as they do in these fine poems. Eye writes out of tenderness, also out of trouble that bursts through tenderness, and out of the understanding that arises from the trouble and changes nothing. He is a poet in his bones, and these poems are deep marrow. I think of Whitman:
This is no book,
Who touches this, touches a man.”
—Brooks Haxton, author of Fading Hearts on the River
“Seed is a book of both wedding and division; rapturous, ecstatic contacts and devastating, ruinous fractures. Impossible to write both unless you have the discriminate sympathy, the discernment, the language chops, the clairvoyance, the exactitude of David Eye. He has looked and listened and felt too much. He has been smitten and spirited away. In all ways this book is ‘exquisite in its rendering.'”
—Bruce Smith, author of Devotions
David Eye 