”In Heidi Seaborn’s An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn is a voice, a mirror, an Other, a symbol, a goddess, and an archetype. Marilyn enacts, for Seaborn, the objectification women are impaled upon, woman as Selfie, as edible subject. By the end, the speaker’s empathic identification with her subject is complete, narrating, in tandem with Marilyn, her last hours, exposing “the grief in glamour,” and finally striding off solo, released, as the credits roll. Something profound has shifted. The insomniac sleeps. For all of its intensity, this collection is as brilliantly composed as a Dior dress. I am in love and in awe.”
~Diane Seuss, Author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry
“Heidi Seaborn's An Insomniac's Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is warning, celebration, homage, critique: at the center of this collection is the icon of all icons, a Marilyn Monroe whom Seaborn excavates and revitalizes, making poems out of documents, letters, photos, empathy, and projection. How much can anyone really understand of another's life, especially a life as examined and invented as Monroe's? And isn't every portrait also a portrait of its maker? These questions, like the aftershocks of sexism, like the tiny white Ambien pill, like the eerie dreads of the sleepless, course through these poems to give us a lively and novel meditation on fame, addiction, loneliness, and the performance of femininity.”
~Catherine Barnett, Author of Solutions to the Problem of the Body in Space
“Heidi Seaborn’s voice is lively and urbane; vivid pains and pleasures abound on every page of this lush, glitteringly alive new book of poems.”
~Deborah Landau, Author of Skeleton
“Heidi Seaborn has crafted a moonlit book in conversation with Marilyn Monroe …Without promising insight, she delivers something more: a freshly captured glimpse of the worlds Marilyn haunts still.”
~John Freeman, Author & Editor of Freeman’s
