Kari Gunter-Seymour
(Albany)
“What is history anyway, / but a conversation we’re born into / without context, a string of songs / about heartbreak, a universe / that made us from its shattering and dust?” asks the speaker in Kari Gunter-Seymour’s poem “To Those Messaging Me After My Mother’s Passing,” from her latest collection of poems Alone in the House of My Heart (2022).
These topical poems address the murder of George Floyd, the infiltration of fracking fluids into the rural Ohio soil, and even the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic—“How far across the sky will the Corona / spread its doom?”
Gunter-Seymour is the currently serving her second appointment as poet laureate of Ohio. She is also the author of the poetry collection A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be See (2020) and editor of the anthology I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices (2022).
If you enjoyed Alone in the House of My Heart, we suggest these Ohio side trips:
- Yalie Kamara’s A Brief Biography of My Name
- Darren C. Demaree’s Two Towns Over
- Dave Lucas’ Weather