Sean Sexton
Sean Sexton was born in Indian River County and grew up on his family’s Treasure Hammock Ranch, eight miles west of Vero Beach, Florida. He divides his time between taking care of a 600-acre cow-calf and seedstock operation and painting and writing. He is married to artist Sharon Sexton, and they live on the ranch with their two children in a house they built with their hands. He has kept journal-sketch books drawn from his life since 1973 and was awarded an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the State of Florida in 2000-2001. He is the author of Waldo’s Mountain, Brief History of a Small Elevation (Waterview Press, 2001) about his grandfather, Waldo Sexton.
BLOOD WRITING
BY SEAN SEXTON
$17.00 (email us for availability)
Van K. Brock Florida Poetry Series (2010)
Praise God! An American poet who doesn't sound like the graduate writing school! -- Les Murray
There's a lot of blood, both human and animal, in Sean Sexton's stirring first book of poetry. His poems, which include several rare and passionate longer poems, evoke the violence and beauty of life on a Florida cattle farm with clear-eyed eloquence, and their gritty details make Robert Frost seem like a New England gentleman farmer. "If you would love, learn / the power of life" Sexton writes, and Blood Writing is a mature and Whitmanesque embrace of a fully realized world. -- Peter Meinke
Sean Sexton's book is a symphony of all the barnyard creatures. Its stories are born of a four-generation family cattle ranch in the king of the southern cattle states, Old Florida. Poignant recognitions weave a fabric of tales that are tender, agonizing, sad, sometimes wry and funny. Putting off heaven and hell as long as possible, imminent demise, the soul busy packing and things that are nothing all have their place. There are vertical knife-like stanzas to bring you home and as Sean says, he has nowhere else to go. With grit and uncompromising clarity, he sketches a tough life on a rough road with no detours. Tears and laughter occur simultaneously, revealing an extraordinary knowing. -- Drum Hadley
Blood Writing
In the place of horns
is that crazy writing
that says nothing,
everywhere in red.
Pulsing,
expressing on boards,
fence posts, other calves
standing together,
heads bowed
sprouting
delicate wands of blood,
streaming
until the pressure slackens,
factors of coagulation set in,
and the writing
runs out.
Posthole Digger's Dream
He knew something
inside her
like the softness
deep
in the ground
at the bottom
of
postholes.
What he knew kept him working
when the digging got bad.