Pat Riviere-Seel's "The Serial Killer's Daughter" (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 39 pages, $10) is the latest in the Editor's Choice Chapbook Series from one of North Carolina's most active small presses.

It's an impressive outing by a poet whose work shows insight, imagination, and maturity.

Riviere-Seel describes herself as a "recovering journalist" and her first collection of poetry, "No Turning Back Now" (Finishing Line Press), was nominated for a Pushcart Award in 2004. She's a past president of the North Carolina Poetry Society and current chairperson of the North Carolina Writers' Conference, which will hold its annual meeting at Little River Resort during the last week in July.

This poetic cycle is based on the life and death of one of North Carolina's most infamous serial killers, Velma Barfield, who was the first woman to be executed after the resumption of capital punishment in 1977.

If you're unfamiliar with Barfield's story, I suggest Jerry Bledsoe's excellent 1998 "Death Sentence" (Dutton).

Riviere-Seel's poems are as stark as her subject. And rightfully so. Barfield was a drug-addicted murderer who used an arsenic-based rat poison to kill her victims.

Employing, in most cases, the persona of Barfield's daughter, Riviere-Seel manages to capture the web of intrigue and misery that touched and transformed the lives of Barfield's family.

"Extra Cash" describes Barfield's son-in-law's reaction to her execution:

The daughter's husband thought that crime should pay.

He'd never cared much for his mother-in-law,

but now the state was about to kill her

and she wanted to donate --just give away! -- all her body parts.

He wondered how much each was worth.

Would an eye bring a hundred, maybe a thousand dollars?

A heart, liver, and kidneys should be more,

maybe enough for a new Harley.

Shouldn't he get something for all his misery --

the shame of it, another job lost, and hadn't he

just been lucky to survive her arsenic in his tea?

Surely the poem turns on the son-in-law's convenient rationalization and his blatant greed, but it might well have explored more interesting circumstances in greater depth (what, for example, would the world look like through the donated eyes of a murderer?). Still, these short snatches of life are enough to release the reader's imagination and pose and answer questions concerning the family's frame of mind.

Although most of the poems are narrative in structure, an occasional lyric graces the page, as with "Velma's Warning":

"What lives within me rises --

a river swollen with storm water

overflows, gushes downstream,

deposits its twiggy debris --

my life,

muddy, uncharted -- swallows everything without warning."

Or this wonderful passage describing Barfield's daughter:

"The serial killer's daughter wears tight curls made of cypress roots

and washes them in buttermilk from the moon.

When the mud oozes between her toes she no longer worries about

wiping her feet before stepping through the door.

She likes to touch people she loves on the nape of the neck and feel

the rocky landscape of their spines."

Riviere-Seel is a brave poet. She's tackled a subject that might well strike her readers as inappropriate -- and she succeeds admirably in taking the reader into the minds of characters whose lives have turned desperate and inexplicable.

The book is available by contacting Main Street Rag Publishing Company, P.O. Box 690100, Charlotte, NC 28227

Contact Stephen Smith at travisses@hotmail.com.