Seema Reza

writing. reading. educating.

 Praise for
A Constellation of Half-Lives

In reading Seema Reza’s A Constellation of Half-Lives, I am at once gutted and seen and loved and broken and made whole. Offering unflinching self-examination, honest social critique, and careful exploration of war-driven trauma, these poems exalt the complicated beauty of humanness. Through this, miraculously, Reza grants us permission to be—just as we are: flawed and difficult and glorious. This book is a gift.

JEANANN VERLEE 
author of Said the Manic to the Muse & Prey

Seema Reza is an incandescent oracle, fighter, writer, and I cannot overstate the importance of her shining poems. She possesses the uncanny ability to sort love into violence and desire, triumph and loss, fear and comfort, and then set the elements blazing. She is the essential artist who knows to fight with each living breath, for justice and for love and for truth, and her determination transforms us. Read her.

SUSANNA SONNENBERG
author of She Matters: A Life in Friendships

Seema Reza’s ‘A Constellation of Half Lives’ is one of the most astounding collections I’ve read. I can’t remember being so caught, so identified, as if by a good friend who knows all my excuses. The poems, like points in the sky, mark out all our heroism, beauty, and savage need. Love, she warns, can be graceless. Also, beauty assures us nothing but itself, and of joy she says, “This is not the easy poem to write.” Yet, there is comfort here, and strength. 

BRENDAN CONSTANTINE
author of Dementia, My Darling

A Constellation of Half-Lives

A Constellation of Half-Lives is a collection of poems that attempt to reconcile the crisis of living on a collapsing planet with the unreasonable joy of loving and the pleasure of being alive.

ORDER NOW

When the World Breaks Open 

In this poignant and unabashed self-examination, Seema Reza uncovers the lessons she learned through motherhood and a dysfunctional and abusive marriage, and how she used her discoveries to make a meaningful difference in the world. This lyrical, non-linear narrative memoir traces Reza’s journey. Through observing her own experiences from the darkest moments of her life and investigating societal attitudes towards loss, love, motherhood, and community, Reza exposes her triumphs, weaknesses, fears and regrets, and undermines the idea that strength requires silence.

order now

Praise for When the World Breaks Open

Written with the calculated wisdom of an elder, and a poet’s striking efficiency, Reza shines her light on the nuances of relationships, where a squeeze of the hand is the difference between love and emptiness. As with Jong, Cisneros, Rich, I predict that Reza is a name we will hear and follow for decades to come.

Tim Hernandez

Author of All They Will Call You

Seema Reza delivers. When the World Breaks Open is a searing song of motherhood, love and redemption through art. Her sons, the death of her marriage, the birth of her courageous artist self is a testimony in which she finds the skin, questions faith, reverberates a familial tongue and rises, yes―rises in a stumbling glory.

Mahogany L. Browne

Author of Black Girl Magic

One respects not only her precise craft but also her thoroughness. Read it, pass it on, share it with your friends, savor it, smell it, throw it, embrace it, pick it up and read a little and lay it down within reach to pick up another time―it’s one of those books, there when we need it to shed a little light on life’s ups and downs.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Author of Healing Earthquakes

Instagram
Follow by Email