Milk, Mess, & Magic: Poems on Parenting

Milk, Mess, & Magic captures the nuances of motherhood. Honesty emanates from the poems as Seelman manages to bring insight without compromise. With vulnerability, these poems explore the challenges of protecting the spiritual growth of a daughter in a male-dominated world. The “milk” is the nurture, the “mess” is the struggle, and the “magic” is the wonder of new life and of woman’s work.

—Melba Joyce Boyd, Michigan Poet Laureate

Milk, Mess, & Magic celebrates the complexity of parenting: the bliss alongside the blues, the wonder alongside the exhaustion. The poems capture the raw truth of parenthood with refreshing humor and rebelliousness. In Seelman’s world, dragons roam around backyards, toddlers befriend geese, and a mother sings Salt-N-Pepa to soothe a crying baby to sleep. “I too am now blessed in a mother’s world,” Seelman writes, exploring the honest struggles and fierce joys of raising fearless and loving children. This debut offers an authentic perspective that will resonate with anyone familiar with the messy magic of family life.

—Alen Hamza, author, Twice There Was a Country

Hannah Seelman’s engaging poems delight unpretentiously as they navigate the surprises of motherhood. Every action reveals a commitment charged with pleasure and wonder. Raising and sheltering a child becomes an unpredictable, ongoing source of the strange, unrepeatable intimacies of motherhood as the mother frees her daughter and the daughter her mother, the two almost merging in continuous gifts of discovery.

—William Olsen, author, TechnoRage and Vision of a Storm Cloud