tic tic tic by Heidi Seaborn Reviewed by Deborah Bacharach

tic tic tic by Heidi Seaborn

Reviewer: Deborah Bacharach

Publisher: Cornerstone Press

Publication Date: 2025

ISBN: 978-1-968148-07-2

Pages: 101

Time’s unrelenting advance, nature about to explode, a heart finding its path… tic, tic, tic goes Heidi Seaborn’s latest full-length collection from Cornerstone Press. This is a book set in the world’s time: each section a season with a winter of COVID and attacks on democracy; a spring of memory; a summer of natural destruction and emerging faith; and in autumn, a speaker “vowing to stay alive with the man I love—.” Seaborn brings us a speaker struggling—to do the right thing as the world collapses, to meet faith where she finds it—and she does so with exceptional craft.

When it comes to the poem on the page, Seaborn is a poet who has the craft to mess around with space and time. She leaves the left margin often. Her five-line time capsules float in the middle of the page, little boxes of memory, like “Class Photo, 1969”:

                                     Always in the back row with the boys
                                     and Patty P. I can easily see all our lives
                                     like rivers flowing onward as we lean
                                     near the cliff of adulthood. I had only an-
                                     swers. Questions arrived later like bees. 

The section is concrete, with names and places. Seaborn includes the literal photo this poem references—the time, the place are nailed down. (This is a technique she uses throughout this book—photos expanding on images from the poems.) But the content and the physical poem are also ephemeral. The shape and spacing of the poem is a commentary itself on time and memory—almost dreamlike in how it floats in so much white space. 

This is a poet not afraid to engage with white space. She offers only five lines on a page for 23 pages, almost the entire spring section. In doing so, she covers a lifetime in tiny moments: a used lube tube, a wedding ring, an obit. In some ways I feel this speaker at the mercy of time—the world is falling apart and she can’t stop it—but she is also taking time on. One of my favorite poems, “Split Second” stays on the left margin, but manages time by, in a four-page poem, using no punctuation until the final period. Before dawn, lovers have a conversation in bed, trying to figure out what they are hearing. The speaker moves us through images of destruction “sometimes I hear the mouths of moths on my cashmere sweaters” and keeps going to get to love. Here’s an excerpt from the middle:

                                     & I felt your body
                                     shift as it left
                                     a dream
                                     the way we leave
                                     our home
                                     unlocked
                                     when we walk the dog
                                     in the evening
                                     & then I opened
                                     my eyes
                                     to the before 

The line breaks control the pace, tone, and meaning. I felt sad and worried when the beloved’s body moves “the way we leave / our home” and then rejoiced when that home is “unlocked.” And the lack of punctuation makes me realize this is all one experience; even with the worry, I am in an unstopped flow of love.

It takes the speaker some time to find her way to action, love, and faith. The title of the first poem is “Accidie,” a word that means both not caring about one’s role in making the world a better place, and, relatedly, spiritual sloth. It’s a strong tone to start the book—self-aware, self-attacking, struggling. In many poems in the early part of the book, the speaker reckons with her failure to answer the world’s cries for help. As she says in “On the Continuum” (one of several with this title) in the spring section: 

                                     On the hottest day ever, I enter the Sainte-Chapelle nave.
                                     Vivaldi rising in the thickened air.
                                     I sweat through the seasons—

                                     Through the crescendo of tanks grinding villages to resin,
                                     of boots on the march, again—

                                     Doesn’t it seem like every day the world burns to the ground—
                                     as we silence the alarm— 

The speaker has entered a place of worship. She focuses on a music that rises above the world’s natural collapse, notices the world’s political struggles, and fails to act. But, it is not just the speaker alone. I really appreciate how Seaborn makes her wisdom claim—“Doesn’t it seem like every day the world burns to the ground— / as we silence the alarm”—a question. The question form engages the reader in the discussion, pulls us into admitting our culpability, and the “we” doubles down on the communal aspect. Not just the speaker, but all of us are silencing the alarm.

As the seasons change, so does the speaker. In “On the Continuum” in the summer section, Vivaldi is still here, but the relationship to his work is completely different:

                                     In a clearing, I see my error

                                     in a shower of light—
                                     this is the way faith asserts itself—

                                     in a cedar cloister, in a circling ferment,

                                     in the plague of rage. Presto!
                                     e de mosche, e mosconi il Stuol furioso!
                                     I kneel in the wrath.  

Seaborn uses the language of religious institutions—“cloister”—to signal that the forest has become the speaker’s spiritual site. And here, “in a shower of light” the speaker has an epiphany; she comes to faith. The Italian is from a Vivaldi sonnet and means “And by furious swarms of flies and hornets.” This is a faith that hears nature’s fury and centers itself in it. 

I almost feel one should read this book with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons playing. It is such a vital force in the poems, setting the overall structure and going with the speaker on her journey. (At a recent reading, Seaborn mentioned she listened to Vivaldi on loop for three weeks as she wrote.) With the music, with the black and white photos every few pages, with several quotes introducing each section, Seaborn creates a world for these poems to live in. And we can live here too. Before the summer section, Seaborn quotes Adrienne Rich, “I know you are reading this poem / between bitterness and hope.” Yes, I am. Read these poems when you see the world burning. Read these poems when you don’t know how to help. Read these poems when you too yearn for faith.

Deborah Bacharach is the author of Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has recently appeared in Poetry East, Last Syllable, Only Poems, and Grist among many other journals, and she has received a Pushcart prize honorable mention. She is a poetry reader for SWWIM and Whale Road Review. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.

Heidi Seaborn is the author of three books of poetry,  tic tic tic, (September 2025), An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and three chapbooks, Bite Marks, Once a Diva and Finding My Way Home. She’s won numerous awards including winning of The Missouri Review Editors Prize in Poetry. Recent work in AGNI, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Financial Times of London, Image, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi’s Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and holds degrees from Stanford and NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com

24 June 2026