Related Interviews:

BARREN MAGAZINE: Marilyn’s Head Now Fully Grown

FRONTIER POETRY: Poet in the Mirror: Heidi Seaborn

Related Essays:

BREVITY: Writing in Persona: Language, Lipstick & a Mirror

LIT HUB: How I Kicked Insomnia & Addiction with the Help of Marilyn Monroe

BEST AMERICAN POETRY: Marilyn Monroe, Poet; Marilyn Loves Poetry & Poets; Poets Love Marilyn Monroe; At the Ritz: Plath, Sexton & Monroe; Selfie with Marilyn Monroe: Writing in the Persona of Marilyn Monroe

“This poet’s shine increases wattage daily. Although she began writing poetry as an adult only in 2016, Seaborn has amassed numerous publications (books—Give a Girl Chaos {see what she can do}, Bite Marks, Finding My Way Home, and Once a Diva—and many articles and poems in journals, and this new book) and awards, and is executive editor at The Adroit Journal and on the board of Tupelo Press. She does not rest on these many laurels but steadily pursues fresh formal investigations and subjects, gifting readers this freshness. Heidi Seaborn strikes this reader as a celebrity of the poetry world. Keep her in your view.” ~Pamela Hobart Carter, Seattle Star

PANK BOOKS, 2021

Praise for An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe:

“An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is a moving interrogation of our infatuation with celebrities and our performance culture.” ~Ron Charles, Book Critic,The Washington Post

“Heidi Seaborn’s An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is a fever dream of deeply sensual and human detail. The collection is at once poetic and historic: a probing exploration into and extrapolation onto the life of Monroe…a work of art that is alive and different…This is a collection to learn from, to teach from.”~The Shore Poetry

“The book is a breathtaking tour de force. It is a fairy tale and a murder mystery, a parable and a mirror in which many women will see ourselves.” -Cultural Daily

“I too have lived on that glittering edge” Heidi Seaborn writes. Indeed. Seaborn’s voice is lively and urbane; vivid pains and pleasures abound on every page of this lush, glitteringly alive new book of poems.” ~Deborah Landau, Author of Soft Targets

“In Heidi Seaborn’s An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn is a voice, a mirror, an Other, a symbol, a goddess, and an archetype. She is also a conveyance for the speaker’s autobiographical material—insomnia, sleeping pills, dangerous embodiment, and lethal disembodiment, until a kiss is nothing but “a transaction of air” and breasts are “tricksters—…pretend(ing) / to guard a heart.” Marilyn enacts, for Seaborn, the objectification women are impaled upon, woman as Selfie, as edible subject, Norman Mailer’s “sweet / bursting peach,” Andy Warhol’s “violent bursting pomegranate.” Indeed, she is the whole alphabet, “mistress, maid, momma, mother, Madonna, mouth, mink, / narcotic, nurse, nutcase, oyster, oh baby.” By the end, the speaker’s empathic identification with her subject is complete, narrating, in tandem with Marilyn, her last hours, exposing “the grief in glamour,” and finally striding off solo, released, as the credits roll. Something profound has shifted. The insomniac sleeps. For all of its intensity, this collection is as brilliantly composed as a Dior dress. I am in love and in awe.”~Diane Seuss, Author of frank: sonnets

“Heidi Seaborn's An Insomniac's Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is warning, celebration, homage, critique: at the center of this collection is the icon of all icons, a Marilyn Monroe whom Seaborn excavates and revitalizes, making poems out of documents, letters, photos, empathy, and projection. How much can anyone really understand of another's life, especially a life as examined and invented as Monroe's? And isn't every portrait also, as you'll find here, a portrait of its maker? These questions, like the aftershocks of sexism, like the tiny white Ambien pill, like the eerie dreads of the sleepless, course through these poems of obsession to give us a lively and novel meditation on fame, addiction, loneliness, and the performance of femininity, where breasts are called ‘precious tickets to a carnival,’ where ‘charm becomes armor‘." ~Catherine Barnett, Author of Human Hours

"Everywhere and nowhere, so conscious of being looked at, but never actually seen, Marilyn Monroe often feels like a precursor of our times. Tearing a page from the pulp films of Norma Jean Baker's era, Heidi Seaborn has crafted a moonlit book in conversation with her. To Seaborn, Marilyn is a guardian spirit, troubled muse, a midnight oracle. Without promising insight, she delivers something more: a freshly captured glimpse of the worlds Marilyn haunts still."  ~John Freeman, Author and Editor of Freeman’s

“I will be thinking of Seaborn’s Marilyn at night for some time to come.” -Tiffany Troy for Tupelo Quarterly

“In this exquisite poetry book, Seaborn follows Marilyn Monroe from an orphanage in Los Angeles to her rise as a sex-kitten bomb shell blowing kisses. Decades after her death, the reader comes to feel real emotion for Monroe’s struggle with insomnia, an abusive foster father and three husbands, and the news of her overdose. In the quiet genius of the poems, Seaborn makes us hope—absurdly, against all odds—for a different ending to the story and shows us that the public adoration of beautiful women often aspires to bed and destroy them at the same time. Instead, Seaborn asks, what if were to give Monroe’s ghost her body, her name, the color of her hair? What if this time we were to crawl into bed with her just to help her fall asleep?” ~Elvira Basevich, [PANK] Poetry Book Judge and Author of How to Love the World