The Waters of Forgetting: Poems

In The Waters of Forgetting, Barry Seiler brings together poems that spring from tensions between memory and forgetting, the past and the present, the daily and the eternal. Whether he is writing about his family or popular music or the violent horrors of our age, Seiler's poems are always concerned with time, the difficulties of living in it and living with it. Moving through these various histories, both personal and public, Seiler juxtaposes small moments with great events, trying to find the connecting threads that will pull the pieces into a form we can make sense of and live by. By the end of the book, he has immersed himself in the memories that trouble and sustain us, seeking comfort and wisdom in The Bath of Peace, the Waters of Forgetting.

Barry Seiler, a native of the Bronx, resides in New Jersey and upstate New York. With a B.A. in English from Queens College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California at Irvine, Seiler teaches at Rutgers University. His poetry has been awarded the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize and a Distinguished Artist grant from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. He has published three chapbooks and two full-length collections, including Black Leaf in the Akron Series in Poetry.