Dustin Brookshire has gathered an impressive array of poetic emulations in When I Was Straight: A Tribute to Maureen Seaton. They include free verse gestures, couplets, tercets, and prose poems. Maureen’s influence shines, though is never blinding—each of the poets in this anthology takes her title and makes the poem that follows their own.

(From the forward by Denise Duhamel)

We read poems from: Kelli Russell Agodon, Sarah Cooper, Aaron DeLee, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Diamond Forde, and Addie Tsai.

Dustin Brookshire (he/him) is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Repeat As Needed (Harbor Editions, 2025) and the chapbooks Never Picked First For Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021) and To T he One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). Love Most Of You Too and Never Picked First For Playtime were finalists in the Poetry Chapbook category of the American Book Fest’s Best Book Awards in 2022 and 2023, respectively.

Poet Maureen Seaton earned an MFA from Vermont College in 1996. She is the author of the poetry collections Fear of Subways (1991), winner of the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize; The Sea Among the Cupboards (1992); Furious Cooking (1996), winner of both the Iowa Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; Little Ice Age (2001); Venus Examines Her Breast (2004), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award; and Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen (2009).

Using collage techniques to create delight and dissonance, Seaton’s poetry has been described as unusual, compressed, and surrealistic. Seaton has explored the possibilities of collaboration throughout her career, writing poetry with Denise Duhamel in such collections as Exquisite Politics (1997), Oyl (2000), and Little Novels (2002). She also collaborated with Samuel Ace on Stealth (2011) and with Neil de la Flor on Sinead O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds (2011). Seaton, Duhamel, and David Trinidad edited an anthology titled Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (2007).

Seaton is author of the Lambda Literary Award–winning memoir Sex Talks to Girls (2008), in which she addresses motherhood, sobriety, and sexuality. She teaches at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.

(from the Poetry Foundation)