The Seed Is Waiting in the Dark by Meesha Goldberg

Goldberg’s luminous debut collection allows us to peer into an extraordinarily intimate partnership with nature. It is a contemplation on mothers and motherlessness, and how despite a legacy of harm, Mother Earth nurtures, heals, and teaches us how to live. These vivid and urgent poems read as a love story with the land, reminding us that our ancestral connections cannot be so easily broken.

–Seo Choi, Publisher, Alpha Sisters Publishing

This collection of powerful invocations is a profound inquiry into the beautiful and painful holding of lineages, languages, names, and wounds in a corporeal body. In the lineage of haunted texts like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, this text feels channeled, unafraid of the clarity that deep grief brings, declaring unabashedly, “Death was kin.” These poems resonate with mentions of the gut, notably, “How can you gut your Mother’s lungs?” and I think about the significance of gut feelings, the concept of Korean han 한 held in the gut, and also gut 굿, the cleansing rites performed by Korean shamans. Goldberg writes, “If women’s tears / are healing rain / there must be grief enough / for our vision to return.” This book is a gift, a ritual, a revelation.

–Janice Lee, Author of Imagine a Death and Separation Anxiety