Just Breathe Normally opens with a traumatic accident. Shattered perceptions and shards of narrative recount the events, from wreck through recovery and beyond. In lyric prose, the stories spiral back through generations to touch on questions of mortality and family, immigration and migration, legacies intended or inflicted.In the wake of her near-fatal cycling collision, Peggy Shumaker searches for meaning within extremity. Through a long convalescence, she reevaluates her family s past, treating us to a meditation on the meaning of justice and the role of love in the grueling process...
Just Breathe Normally opens with a traumatic accident. Shattered perceptions and shards of narrative recount the events, from wreck through rec...
"With rare insight, clarity, and grace, Peggy Shumaker charts both the minutiae of miniature lives and the grand and cosmic movements affecting earth's more imposing denizens. She tracks the profound and subtle dislocations or illuminations of self inspired by the closest regard of our natural world. This volume brims with the gifts and losses, struggles and triumphs that the poet gleans from nature, and which both instruct and sustain us all. Bearing an exquisite beauty and purity, these poems soar."
Maurya Simon, author of Days of Awe and The Golden Labyrinth
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"With rare insight, clarity, and grace, Peggy Shumaker charts both the minutiae of miniature lives and the grand and cosmic movements affecting ear...
Savoring Alaskan landscapes by way of birch trees has become Kes Woodward s trademark. This collection brings together thirty years of his birch portraits and forest close-ups. Over those same thirty years, poet Peggy Shumaker has traveled inner landscapes via images drawn from two deserts the Sonoran and the Subarctic. Her poems embody the harsh beauty of heat and cold, the force of true extremes. Wounded trees, marked paths, slashes of color. Bursts of passions, licks of flame. The sensual spirits of two imaginations at work fuel this this volume.
Savoring Alaskan landscapes by way of birch trees has become Kes Woodward s trademark. This collection brings together thirty years of his birch portr...
What happens when we enter unfamiliar realms, when we open ourselves to the unknown? Sometimes that not-knowing makes art possible. In Toucan Nest, the eighth book by Alaska State Writer Laureate Peggy Shumaker, her first vivid encounters with the rainforests of Costa Rica with its basilisk lizards, bats, and bromeliads, its crocodiles, sloths, and strangler figs refresh and renew our world in a work of startlingly beautiful mindfulness and imagination."
What happens when we enter unfamiliar realms, when we open ourselves to the unknown? Sometimes that not-knowing makes art possible. In Toucan Nest<...
