NCWN

The Serial Killer's Daughter by Pat Riviere-Seel
ISBN 13: 978-1-59948-162-3
42 pages, $10
Main Street Rag
Chapbook can be ordered at http://www.mainstreetrag.com/PRiviere-Seel.html
Winner of the 2009 Roanoke-Chowan Award

The poems arise from the life and execution of Velma Barfield. Velma, from eastern NC, was convicted in 1978 of first degree murder in thepoisoning death of her fiancé. She confessed to poisoning at least three others who died from the poison, including her mother. Her When she was executed in November 1984 in Raleigh, her survivors included a daughter, a son and three grandchildren. Although based on factual and reported information, the poems are works of imagination.

What others are saying about the book:

“Pat Riviere-Seel’s The Serial Killer’s Daughter lays a heavy burden on its reader: a burden that asks the reader to hold the tension between the emotions of anger and desire for vengeance and the emotions of pity and compassion. Merging her experience as a newspaper reporter with her esteemed poetic skill, Riviere-Seel has transformed a journalistic sensation into a work of terrible beauty. This book moves us all, in the end, toward an unknowable continent, which is, perhaps, the human heart in all its vast complexities.” – Cathy Smith Bowers