Told in the Seed and Selected Poems offers poems from Sanora Babb's more than sixty years of writing and publishing poetry. This new collection adds many of her earliest poems to those of her later years that were in the original Told in the Seed. A new introduction by Carol S. Loranger notes that "Of all Sanora Babb's writings, it is the poetry, perhaps, that offers the most intimate and unvarnished picture of the woman and the artist." In the introduction Loranger weaves together relevant information about Babb's life with the more personal poems to further enhance the reader's appreciation.

Babb published her first poem at fourteen in the Forgan Eagle and continued to write and publish poetry from the 1920s to the early 1990s in a wide range of journals and publications. She won the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award in 1967 for "Told in the Seed" and the Gold Medal Award in 1932 for "Captive" from the Mitre Press Anthology, London.

Having a strong empathy with people and their daily lives, an affinity with all in the natural world, and the ability to elevate the ordinary into the extraordinary, Babb reflects all this in her poetry. Her poems quicken with lyricism, clarity, and a powerful sense of immediacy.