Aimee Seu's new chapbook explores her life's influential experiences, looking outward for her writing inspiration

By Emily Wilmot

Aimee Seu looks at life through her own unique lenses, letting observations of her friends, family, and romances take her writing to new, sometimes previously unexplored places.

Seu’s most recent publication, Nepenthe Radiant, is a beautifully written, soul-wrenching chapter book that delves into the influential people and experiences in her life. The collection of poems is also her gateway to life beyond education as she begins her transition from her academic studies at Florida State University into the larger world.

As her time at FSU comes to an end, Seu recently was busy moving with her brother to Philadelphia. While she was on a walk, however, she spoke on a telephone call about her new work.

“I wrote this book while recovering from a difficult relationship that physiologically changed me,” Seu says. “I couldn’t write linearly or write things that made perfect sense. I had to allow my writing to swing back and forth the way my mind was swinging back and forth, between memories that felt really blissful and memories that felt really painful.”

The chapbook developed after Seu learned the word “nepenthe.” She found the term not through the original text but from Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, The Raven. She later researched its meaning on the internet to find the definition. Mentioned in Homer’s The Odyssey, “nepenthe” is a fictional drug, used to dispel all pains of the mind through forgetfulness.

“I thought the sound of it was so strong and beautiful,” she says.

The word connects to the subjects of the poems in Nepenthe Radiant, as Seu delves into grief, loss, and trauma throughout the writing, experiences that would make nepenthe all the more tempting.

“I felt nepenthe had such a sad connotation because it makes you think of worry and what it’s quelling but also a euphoric promise of what if there was a drug to relieve all worry and pain. How delicious would that be,” she asks.

As she walks and talks, Seu recalls the path she has been on for the past four years as a doctoral candidate in the English department’s Creative Writing Program. Her time at FSU has been an overall positive experience, with the people being the best part.

“My peers in the Creative Writing Program are amazing, and I have enjoyed working with the professors,” she says. “I’ve made best friends through being at FSU and completing my final year remotely has made me miss the community of going to the readings at The Bark and being in classes with other poets and fiction writers.”

The balance Seu found in Nepenthe Radiant between the positive and negative was prominent in the book’s predecessor as well, Velvet Hounds. A winner of the 2020 Akron Poetry Prize, her first collection took a more introspective view.

“It was necessary for my functioning to write Velvet Hounds, and when I didn’t have to keep rehashing and revising it, I was relieved of something,” Seu says. “I was able to, in a big way, absolve myself of them somehow.”

When writing Nepenthe Radiant, though, Seu unintentionally looked outward for inspiration, and when she wrote a poem dedicated to the loss of her brother’s best friend, a course was set.

“That death rocked me in a way I didn’t expect,” she says. “It hit me so deeply that I just needed to write that poem. Maybe that sort of set me off on a trend of looking around me at what needs to be honored, what stories need to be told. What have I seen that’s moved me so much that I have to capture it as best I can?”

The people she holds or held dear are a part of those influences, creating pushes big and small in her writing process.

“There’s an overwhelmingly rich and potent feeling in both romantic and familial love that I am drawn back to over and over again,” Seu says. “Striving toward my family has supported and saved me so many times, and the desire to talk about that has pushed me to write poems a lot.”

The final poem of the new chapbook focuses on the significance of romantic love, and Seu finds a drive from there as well.

“During, but especially after a breakup, the question is ‘how do I tell anyone what just happened?’ That was crazy, and now I’m alone with this story, and the only other person who knows it is gone,” she says. “So, you just end up talking to a page about it.”

After all the events that led to the creation of Nepenthe Radiant, Seu is looking forward to graduating from FSU. She’s currently exploring her options, alongside the anticipation of the release of her book.

“I’m excited. I am looking for my next thing, which is nerve-wracking, but I’m trying to enjoy the uncertainty of the in-between,” Seu says. “Life is just full of uncertainty, so if you don’t learn to like it, you won’t be able to adapt.”

Praise for the book has been positive from readers who were given an advanced copy, and FSU English professors have provided singing reviews.

“The poems in Nepenthe Radiant return us to that place where personal and communal mythology face a head-on collision with harsh reality, a disaster area where ‘the crash site yearns for the crash,’” Professor James Kimbrell writes in one review. “Unapologetic and generous, even at their most elegiac, these poems carry an affirming richness meant less to compensate for than to assuage and articulate the inevitable pain of love and loss.”

Seu has reveled in the reactions to her newest poems, with appreciation and gratitude among her emotions.

“I got lucky that my former professors wrote blurbs for the book—their approval has meant a lot to me,” she says. “These people whose work you’ve read and admired so much, the fact that they’ve devoted their brain power to saying something about your work, it was overwhelming, and I was so grateful.”

Nepenthe Radiant will be released on June 27, 2025, with preorders available now by using this link.

Emily Wilmot is an English-Editing, Writing, and Media major, with a minor in economics.

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