Furious Cooking (Iowa Poetry Prize)

By turns chic, romantic, sardonic, droll, seductive, and in your face, Maureen Seaton is a cornucopia of attitudes and styles, a street-smart, deeply talented woman who wryly contemplates the charades that the self and the world assume - and how hard it is to stay in focus the morning after. It gets very, very hot in Seaton's kitchen and in her poems. As this inventive and imaginative poet states, "Furious Cooking is a stew of accidents and incidents roiling across universes."
Seaton creates curious and energetic juxtapositions; she revisits violence and assesses its damages. The poet/woman in the thick of this caldron instigates polarities and assumes the roles of inquisitor and heretic, perpetrator and child, painter and artifact, scientist and specimen. She careens circularly through the hypocrisies and atrocities of church and partner, established sanctioned realities, the seeming senseless death of loved ones in this life and long ago.