James Seay’s essays reflect a poet’s eye for detail and a seeker’s wrestling with life’s big questions and experiences: what it means to be a parent, losing a child, confronting mental illness, observing and living through the collision of cultures, finding the universal in the particularity of every day. We share moments with Seay that stay with us, dipping in and out of his life and our own collective experience, as he reflects on childhood memories of his grandmother wringing chicken necks for Sunday dinner, reads his way through Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, processes 9/11, watches The Sopranos, and ponders the American obsession with guns. These essays transport readers—from the South to the Southwest, from the former Soviet Union to France, and beyond—while exploring disparate topics, often using literature as a means of understanding culture and place.
Seay offers few easy answers for the big questions he explores. But walking with him on his journeys will open eyes to the possibilities, tenderness, and mysteries that surround us, hidden among everyday things.