Mailbox Monday #479
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fce0b1ce9-355d-4524-9575-7cf4714b6602_450x346.jpeg)
Mailbox Monday, created by Marcia at To Be Continued, formerly The Printed Page, has a permanent home at its own blog. To check out what everyone has received over the last week, visit the blog and check out the links. Leave yours too.
Also, each week, Leslie, Martha, and I will share the Books that Caught Our Eye from everyone’s weekly links.
Here’s what we received:
The Minor Territories by Danielle Sellers, which I purchased.
In Danielle Sellers' The Minor Territories, a past has never really passed, it follows you from state to state and across continents; its memories are as fresh as the revelations of old love letters, those missives so full of missing. Every poem feels so rich with intimate potential, from the unspoken truths between two people to the most fragile details of a shared life—a spider's silky filaments, peach tree saplings, butter coppering in a pan. This book manages to hold with an open hand all the loves I want and fear to lose—the ones who knew me, the one who knows me, the one who grew from the past into the brightest now. —Traci Brimhal, author of Saudade
The Minor Territories, the second collection from Danielle Sellers, powerfully affirms the practice of keen and patient seeing. Time and again in these poems, life deals pain, but the poet pays attention until pain gives way to curiosity and curiosity to gratitude. Winter strips the willows, yes, but “through their bare branches / a church spire. Were it spring, I would have not seen it.” A little girl waits all day on a porch for her long-lost father. “He never returns,” but she does glimpse “three monarchs / and a praying mantis.” In one poem, the speaker says of her lover, “I wanted him / to see me. Really see me.” While the pain of going unseen racks the world of this book, Sellers takes care to see whatever has been missed, to really see it. To borrow a phrase from Yeats, everything here has been steeped in the heart. —Greg Brownderville, author of A Horse with Holes in It
Danielle Sellers’ The Minor Territories is intellectually lush and emotionally resonant. Sellers is a born storyteller, and this book, in the end, is a succession of love stories that reveal, over its course, a deep, surprising, and complicated love between the speaker and the world she makes and remakes for herself. These poems are necessary, dynamic, heartbreaking, redemptive, and smart. They bring you in, hold you close, and tell the truth. —Carrie Fountain, author of Burn Lake What did you receive?