Beginning with two photographs and objects in a cardboard box, Jackie Shelley paints a landscape of a family over six generations. The changing shapes of her poems mirrors how families are changed by death, divorce, grief, and mental illness. Though these poems contain tragedies, love endures through time as objects of inheritance.
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Deborah Bayer
, author,
Rope Made of Bandages
What do we choose to inherit from our flawed families? Is it even a choice at all? In Jackie Shelley's
Keep/Discard,
we are presented with a meditation on generational grief. Shelley's poems, like the nature of memory itself, sometimes float away from the margins, jump forward and backward in time - all connecting to create our messy personal history and a legacy that is more than an attic full of artifacts caked in dust.
Ben Hyland
Shelter in Place
You'll return to Jackie Shelley's
Keep/Discard
again and again, first to appreciate the stunning images, such as "Tonight, I will gnaw / on the bones of the dead," "the dreamy / aspirations of mud," and "as crickets grieve." Then you'll go back to Shelley's pitch-perfect poems that bring lost family members and treasured objects to life, and be stirred by unexpected questions and insights in these intelligent, inventive poems.
Barbara Daniels
Talk to the Lioness