Our Authors
Seth Brady Tucker
Seth Brady Tucker’s third book of poems, The Cruelty Virtues, probes the edges of the culture of masculinity as it investigates how we create our own “flawed men” amid the seemingly depthless expectations for violence and toughness. These poems uncover how our predatory approaches to nature and culture were borne of this contemporary masculine resurgence and the cynical conflict over gender. These poems are filled with hope, however, and give each reader insight into how joy and empathy and love will survive even as we face the new masculine authoritarianism evident in American politics. His poems are immediate and sensual and muscular and often bounce from the tenderness of a bee protecting the hive to desperate voices of men who have lost perspective when it comes to patriotism, duty, and war. His speakers can be hard-nosed, obstinate, and ironic as he manages the “worker mentality” that is part and parcel to our current post-capitalistic culture, but can also appreciate the way a bee sting is the ultimate sacrifice for a higher purpose. These poems move from beehive to parking garage to VA hospital beds to cults of masculinity to bio-engineered pesticide deserts with ease, and his experiences in the proving grounds of masculine cultural perversity (as an Army paratrooper, ranch hand, acetylene pipe-cutter, farmer) pair satisfactorily with these moral inquiries that come from his work as a professor and bee-keeper.
Seth Brady Tucker’s third collection, The Cruelty Virtues, is a passionate reckoning with what it means to be human in the contemporary world. These are restless, inventive verses, given an accelerant of love and anger. If you’re standing in a bookstore and reading this blurb, just turn to the poem, “A Murder of Murderers.” Tucker is the friend and poetic voice our curious and broken and beautiful and damaged world needs. This collection not only points to the pain and beauty of this life—it offers hard-earned wisdom gleaned from deep attention—wisdom that implores us to realize how we live “our lives spent holding tight/ when the world has/ always been asking/ us to give everything away.”
—Brian Turner, Wild Delight of Wild Things
In The Cruelty Virtues, we find a poet painstakingly interrogating white American masculinity—and his complicity therein. We see how this masculinity demands that men and boys distort their pain into violence, and how the poisons of warfare seep into the body and mind until “You are forever a gun strapped / to your own back.” Moving through these poems of exquisite, precise detail, I was moved by Tucker’s struggle to see a future in a landscape infected by human-engineered chemicals, to find tenderness buried beneath our species’ self-annihilating denialism. The brutality and beauty of this work is what our 21st century crisis desperately needs.
—Nicky Beer, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes
“I am a man with a love so deep & so scalding,” writes Seth Tucker in his gut-wrenching new collection of poems, The Cruelty Virtues, “that I would hunt down & destroy even the memories that haunt you.” These poems, filled with men both kind and cruel and the women who tolerate them at their best and worst, demonstrate the radical empathy that only a poet with Tucker’s skill and sensitivity could achieve. In this stunning collection, nature may be destroyed by laziness or consumption, minds and bodies shredded by war, and yet, as senseless as the world can appear, The Cruelty Virtues offers hope and the possibility of redemption. The world may try to “burn away everything but the chaff,” as one poem declares, but Tucker’s words find wheat.
—Leona Sevick, The Bamboo Wife
“You have been given all the awful tools necessary to be a man.”
In The Cruelty Virtues, Seth Brady Tucker writes from the complicated intersections of masculinity, war, class, and the legacies we inherit. This is a masterful poetry collection—gritty, often tender—rooted in personal experience and a restless moral curiosity. The speaker is a flawed man writing toward clarity in a flawed world. He never shies away from life’s dark currents, but he doesn’t glamorize them either. With long, layered lines and a sharp sense of irony, Tucker turns everyday moments into meditations on justice, tenderness, and what it means to live with both love and regret. This is one of those necessary collections that stays with you and calls you back again and again.
—January Gill O’Neil, Glitter Road
The Cruelty Virtues is a book I’ve been needing to read since the global pandemic changed our lives forever. I loved these poems. In his recent collection, Seth Brady Tucker grabs the reader by the hand, delivers a bouquet of cautions, then guides us through a field of ominous but often beautiful parables. The stories here are not riddles, they are not hidden, they are as naked as “the goldfinch & the robin & the chipmunk & the barn owl.” I found myself implicated in this precarious landscape, an intrusive minor character—you will too. We are forced to consider our contributions to this nation’s brutality and barbarism, to recognize that “we are cowards too.” The griot here sees everything and reminds us that no matter the bleakness, there’s treasure in the miracle of a Skittle wrapper. There’s thaumaturgy in child-rearing. Hope is still here. Fly towards it.
—Derrick Harriell, Stripper in Wonderland
Seth Brady Tucker is the author of We Deserve the Gods We Ask For, which won the Gival Press Poetry Award and went on to win the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Mormon Boy won the Elixir Press Editor’s Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. His fiction, essays, and poetry have won a number of individual writing awards including the Shenandoah Bevel Summers Fiction Prize and the Literal Latte Short Fiction Award, among others. His recent work appears in such magazines and journals as Copper Nickel, the Los Angeles Review, the Birmingham Poetry Review, Driftwood, Lit Mag, the North American Review, and Poetry Northwest, among many others.
Seth also is a founder and the current executive director of the Longleaf Writers’ Conference, which takes place every May in Seaside, Florida. Seth is an alumnus of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and he has degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, Northern Arizona University, and top-ranked Florida State University (PhD, 2012).
Seth’s fiction is represented by Alex Glass at Glass Literary Management, New York. Seth teaches poetry and fiction workshops at the Light House Writer’s Workshop as well as the Colorado School of Mines near Denver where he is a full teaching professor. He is originally from Wyoming and once served as an Army 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper in Iraq.
