Seed

About David Eye

Before David Eye earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, he spent four years in the military, which places him in an elite group of writers who have served in both the U.S. Army and the Broadway tour of Cats. His work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. He is the winner of the 2014 Hudson Valley Writers Guild Non-Fiction Award in humor, and he was a finalist in the 2015-2016 Tennessee Williams Poetry Contest, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa. David has taught at Syracuse University, St. John’s University, Manhattan College, and Cazenovia College. Though he grew up in rural Virginia, he lives (for now) at the edge of a forest in the Catskill Mountains.

Praise for Seed

The poems in Seed are luminous and intimate. With emotional clarity that surprises and enriches, David Eye has crafted a debut that illuminates how queerness shapes and shelters the self. His lines are elegant, exact, and rich with both joy and sorrow. This is beautiful and bracing work.
—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Slow Lightning

Eye’s Seed is the seed of trees and paper, sex and procreation. His poems flourish with observation and compassion. He takes us from farm animals and rattlesnakes in West Virginia to New York City buses and subway lines to a bar in Florence. Through his longing for family and children, his empathetic connection to the world’s joys and unspeakable despair, he honors survival and humanity in sonnets and prose poems, in villanelles and free verse wonders. Seed is a stunning debut.
—Denise Duhamel, author of Scald

David Eye’s poems remind me that nuance and candor are stronger in a writer, and in a friend, when they appear together, as they do in these fine poems. Eye writes out of tenderness, also out of trouble that bursts through tenderness, and out of the understanding that arises from the trouble and changes nothing. He is a poet in his bones, and these poems are deep marrow. I think of Whitman: “This is no book, / Who touches this, touches a man.”
—Brooks Haxton, author of Fading Hearts on the River

Seed is a book of both wedding and division; rapturous, ecstatic contacts and devastating, ruinous fractures. Impossible to write both unless you have the discriminate sympathy, the discernment, the language chops, the clairvoyance, the exactitude of David Eye. He has looked and listened and felt too much. He has been smitten and spirited away. In all ways this book is “exquisite in its rendering.”
—Bruce Smith, author of Devotions