Reviews

In our time of unravelment—when the digital world threatens to undo everything else—Penelope Shuttle can gather the scattered strands of our lives in poems that are at once conversational and utterly, unpredictably poetic. That is, their formal beauty and emotional charge go hand in hand. In this age of soundbite jargon, metaphor still comes as naturally to Shuttle as English does.

…Shuttle expresses a sense of alienation that seems to go beyond a mere “quarrel.” She describes a world in which we cannot be entirely sure that we have fully experienced or accurately remembered anything, except perhaps our hunger for meaning and communication…