“With its steady capture of memory recalled, quotes, moments from real and represented (fictive) life, Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study assembles an exquisite, if not propulsive leap into the aftermath of a relationship with a white man—only to land with the grace of a skilled dancer. Elliptically reminiscent of Lily Hoang’s Bestiary and Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness, this is not an auto-ethnography by a Black woman, but an immaculate bricolage that both confronts and reckons various channels of knowing and being with the messy, complicated desires of inter- and intra-racial relationships. Here is a woman who does not “avoid speaking a violence.” Of a wound in healing, Sebree “pick[s] until no remnants of a scab exist;” in peering deeply into the crevasses of pop culture, critical race studies, and literature, she clears the surface not for restoration, but unhindered transcendence.”

“Black womanhood, the unyielding past, bonds forged and broken—all are powerfully explored in ways that allow the reader to feel present in each poem, walking with the narrator and bearing witness to moments of racism and violence.”

“Field Study is a story told in revolutions, the narrative turning over and forward while referring to observations made pages earlier, like notetaking . . . one feels these are sentences written in real-time, immediately as we encounter them on the page . . . one understands through this book that “truth in poetry” depends not on the record of information but on experience: a life represented in metaphor, the patterns of language that make a time-signature through which we listen.”

“From the first poem in Mistress, Chet’la Sebree’s voice gripped me and held on. Sebree’s vision of the persona poem is startling: the narrator is both Sally Hemings and a woman in the present merged to a consciousness un-nesting the ‘holler hidden in her.’ Like Kara Walker’s murals, Sebree runs from—and faces—the dark looming historical forces of miscegenation, enslavement, and the abjection of the black female body. The ghost of Sally Hemings as aberration, as mistress, determines the speaker’s id; tugs at her solitary fantasies; a violent erotic invasion that she inverts and turns on its head with lines etched in rage. Sebree’s language is a scythe that glints wildly. Mistress is truly an astonishing, unforgettable debut.”