Sean Sexton 

Sean Sexton was born and raised on his family's Treasure Hammock Ranch and divides his time between writing, painting, and managing a 700-acre cow-calf and seed stock operation. He is author of Blood Writing: Poems (Anhinga Press); May Darkness Restore: Poems (Press 53); and two chapbooks. His third full poetry collection is Portals: Poems (Press 53). He has performed at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, the Lone Star Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Alpine, Texas, the Miami Book Fair International, and the High Road Festival of Poetry and Short Fiction in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was nominated for a 2020 and 2021 Pushcart Prize and received a Florida Individual Artist’s Fellowship in 2001. Sean is a board member of the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation and founding event chair of the Annual Poetry and Barbeque now in its eleventh year. He also co-founded and curates a Poetry and Organ Advent and Lenten Concert Series at Community Church in Vero Beach, Florida, featuring nine concerts each year attracting poets from all over the United States. He became inaugural Poet Laureate of Indian River County in 2016.

Sean Sexton’s Portals is a meditation on living, on dying, on memory, on the labor of our hands when they are connected to “the roots of creation.”
—Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet and The Wild Delight of Wild Things

Praise for Portals: Poems

Our rivers are hiding in the ground, and to trace

them to source, is a passing through the narrowed

auricles and ventricles of an ancient heart.

  from “Our Rivers are Hiding”

The poet Sean Sexton is as American as Whitman and Sandburg and Frost and as far-reaching as Akhmatova and Yeats and Neruda. His collection, Portals, is as expansive in subject, tone, and structure as it is breathtaking in the lyrical quality of its craftsmanship and language. Reading this stunning collection is like looking inside the workings of the mind and soul and spirit of a man who has given his life to poetry but also to nature, family, friends, art, music, and—if that’s not enough—the arduous life-work of a cattle rancher. Sexton has taken upon himself to trace to their source the great mysteries of this world and, as much as possible, to shine a light into its vast and ancient heart.

—Cathy Smith Bowers, former North Carolina Poet Laureate and author of The Abiding Image

The pastoral of Vergil’s Georgics and Bucolics is one of convention, unlike the grueling, hands-on engagement reported in the poems of cattleman-poet Sean Sexton. He is the first I know of to make the realities of animal husbandry available for poetry. The plethora of gritty detail, by the transformative power of art, comes to mean more than the bare facts. Sexton is fully in touch with the cruelty involved in controlling the life and death of creatures he recognizes as conscious individuals. I speculate that writing about it is for him a kind of atonement, one that begins with an implied self-incrimination. Meanwhile, the poems, seasoned by long experience, pour forth, musically hitting the pail, nourishment for the minds and heart of those receiving them.

—Alfred Corn, author of The Returns: Collected Poems

What a beauty of a book you hold in your hands. Sean Sexton’s Portals is a meditation on living, on dying, on memory, on the labor of our hands when they are connected to “the roots of creation.” Formally inventive, crafted with a keen ear ever attuned to the profound, these poems are filled with hard truths, while consolation is woven throughout, as in the poem, “Voices”: “The sound rises, spreads / its solace upon the land apprehending the gloom / and in this moment it is easy once again / to believe in things to come.” Portals is a book of love poems, a book of wisdom earned through deep attention, that which asks, “What is most alive, which the dying?” Just read “Eating the Heifer” or “Departure”—you’ll know right off that this is a book to carry with you for the rest of your days. 

—Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet and The Wild Delight of Wild Things

Praise for May Darkness Restore

This is a glorious book—Sean Sexton's generous, unerring artist's eye finds extraordinary beauty in the often difficult everyday facts in the life of a third-generation Florida cattle rancher. He glories in the magic and alchemy of language and turns words and phrases like “Rhizobium leguminosarum” and “raggedy-assed tractor" into pure poetry. This book celebrates the beauties of generation, death, rebirth and love, and offers us all a share of truly redemptive grace.

—Sidney Wade, author of Bird Book: Poems

Buck Ramsey told us the earliest roots of contemporary cowpunch culture could be found in two sources: Hesiod’s Works and Days and the songs and poems of Robert Burns—the Greek philosopher carrying the subject matter and the Scots bard supplying the language. Were Buck with us today, he’d see the two come together in Sean Sexton’s May Darkness Restore, a risky and rewarding work that couples a poet’s words with the rhythms and cycles of the natural world. Risky—for that is where poetry lives—and rewarding—for that is where tradition lives. I highly recommend it.

—Andy Wilkinson, author of Surprise, Texas

 It was Thomas Jefferson’s settled view that a nation in close contact with the land, directly involved with its cultivation during the seasonal round, would maintain the values that make for a great people. Yet poetry dealing with this vital subject is scarce, which is one reason we welcome Sean Sexton’s work. Another is that it embodies, in Keats’s words, “the holiness of the heart’s affections,” realized with originality, economy, and skill. These are poems for which we can feel true gratitude.

—Alfred Corn, author of Tables and The Returns: Collected Poems