Persist Onward Through Time
tic tic tic
Heidi Seaborn
Cornerstone Press, 2025
For many contemporary works of poetry, the central concept that defines and arranges a collection can vary wildly from highly stylized and structured to low-key and freeform. Heidi Seaborn’s tic tic tic (Cornerstone Press, 2025) deftly threads the needle between these extremes with its composition, arranging its body of work by seasons and yet, more poignantly, binding each set of poems therein with a unique lens on the human experience. Winter writes of frozen lakes and summer of fire and smoke, but it’s winter’s depiction of life as an ephemeral passage through time that truly encapsulates it. It’s summer’s notion that grief is a kind of absence expanding that makes it feel whole.
Yet no isolated section of the collection remains independent of the others. Seaborn’s tic tic tic holds onto its big ideas, responds to them, and grows wiser to them with the epiphanies we gain as a persisting citizen of earth. As a start, in “Winter 2020-2021” (pg. 9), Seaborn sharply juxtaposes the transitory quality attached to daily life against the political spectacle of demagoguery, writing “It is winter solstice, dark at dawn / and the barbarous king lies in his gold-encrusted chambers, a burnished throne—”
This poem, like many which fall within a subsection of Winter titled “CONTINUUM,” places large-scale atrocities and violations of human rights against the small-scale vignette of one person’s life. The “exiled king” (“Spring 2024—,” pg. 18) returns to office while the speaker sharpens her knives at the butcher’s; the October 7th bombings occur while the speaker is celebrating her son’s wedding. These parallels are chilling and sharp when played in contrast.
Turning the same subject on its head, in Summer’s “FORTY-TWO DAYS UNTIL THE ELECTION” (pg. 71), Seaborn’s approach to the American theater of war transmogrifies with the rising heat, in which “Drowsy from inhaling the sharp September sun, / I nearly forget what is happening beyond my porch—” But the scope of Summer stretches beyond the groundwork that Winter has set; it pulls the reader uncomfortably close and slows things down, therein examining the mundanity of living through a self-destructing earth in real time.
When Maui incinerated, when—
the Atlas Mountains quaked, when the thrust of hurricane Idalia, when rivers rose—
over Emilia-Romagna, Libya, Hong Kong, and creatures of the summer heat—
And I can’t outrun the news. It hardens into the landscape—
like volcanic magma surfacing into oxygen. Is anyone listening to the frenzy—
of poets except other poets?
“Feverish” (pg. 68)
By contrast, in Spring, Seaborn explores the phenomenon of human connection and relationships in intimate proximity to nature. Like with every season, Seaborn precedes Spring with a pairing of quotes from other poets, to which Brenda Hillman’s feels most poignant in capturing her vision: “Here from this century can you say / was it wild to be born? / Was there anything else like this, anything at all?”
Furthermore, Spring’s subsection of works entitled “TIME CAPSULE” candidly portrays what we as people are to each other through the medium of visual record. Brief poems describing tax forms, maps, and text messages alike work in chorus to canonize fragments of Seaborn’s human connections, be it about a sister, a lover, or even an inappropriate boss. Nature not only persists here as a backdrop, but as an active player, both cohering and contrasting at times with these mediums of human artifice.
And then there’s Autumn, represented by only one poem (titled “TAKE FIVE,” pg. 95) out of the entire collection’s fifty cumulative works, in which Seaborn seamlessly marries tic tic tic’s many quandaries by remarking: “Again, the brush over drum, / shuffle, shuffle over cymbal. / I’m vowing to stay alive with the man I love—”
In totality, there is much to love about Seaborn’s tic tic tic, in no small part thanks to the author’s attentive marriage of the human experience to all that occurs around it. Macro and micro examinations of survival amidst chaos create such an effect that the speaker, along with everyone around her, become to the reader like a flock of birds in imperfect formation, or listeners to the discordant rhythm of music. Because as Seaborn sees it, there is constant evolution to the way in which we persist onward through time, both as individuals reckoning with change and alongside others doing the same.
This review has been edited for style.
Basil James is portrait artist, ex-English teacher, and poetry editor for Chaotic Merge Magazine. They currently reside in Olympia, Washington. Basil’s work is featured in ellipsis… literature and art, OxMag, Watershed Review, storySouth, and will soon be published in INKWELL. Basil also has a couple English degrees hidden away somewhere in storage. Follow them on Instagram @gaybarrymore.