National Network for Equitable Library Service

The capacity of the rediscovered world to signal and illuminate, restore and repair, fuels the poems in Every Shameless Ray. In Every Shameless Ray, it's more often possible to find one's way when headed somewhere else. Intellectually curious, emotionally acute and playful in form, these poems rely upon the unreliable - the accidents and reversals that expose prescriptive narratives of war and patterns of desire. In poems about a child's misunderstood words and the shock of a Matisse painting, habits of perception are interrupted and disrupted. Liminal spaces open up - in the movements of a to-be-lover's hands as he eases out the under-row of slick black papaya seeds, or when a tipped-over kayaker rides a river's current upside-down. The heart may ache, grave illness threaten, war rage and art tear down its foundations, but a shameless calling, a fine disorder persistently reveals new realities. In a time of social and political disruption, these poems explore and engage personal, social, and political realms intimately, contemplatively, and in protest.