Gnawed Bones

From wildfire and war to bleached reefs and human frailty, Peggy Shumaker’s new poems meditate on mortality. Her poems speak with elegaic force for lost languages, lost ancestors, lost ways of being. This work sharpens the edges of our perception, drawing on the inner life, on secrets that keep us alive. With language as lyrical as the natural world, the poems in Gnawed Bones nourish us.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Peggy Shumaker’s sixth full-length collection, Gnawed Bones, is perhaps her finest. Shumaker . . . covers a wide range—but she casts a far more personal eye, worrying at the puzzle of human relationships as well as human connection to the land itself.”—Judith Kitchen, The Georgia Review

“. . .poems like Gnawed Bones posit the natural world as humankind’s most fundamental origin, the source of literary invention as well as personal loss. . . . desolate landscapes and sweeping vistas initiate the full range of human experience, which in turn gives way to artistic expression.  Gnawed Bones is distinguished by its attempts to situate even everyday speech within the harmonious ebb and flow of the natural world.” —Kristina Marie Darling, The Gettysburg Review

“Shumaker uses words like an artist uses paint. Color, meaning, innuendo and exclamation mingle, creating new colors, new nuances, new ways of seeing familiar objects. And her juxtapositions. . . are extraordinary.”
—Libbie Martin, The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner (read entire review)

“Her newest collection, Gnawed Bones, is infused with her generosity and a tenderness that is all-encompassing. Shumaker’s vision casts a wide net—Alaska, Hawaii, the past, the present, art, wildfire, death—nothing is excluded. . . . The grace that is so much Peggy Shumaker’s hallmark is the keystone of the collection. It is like having a tour guide who sees the world with eyes that cherish. Even pain, even sorrow is luminous when held up to the light of Peggy’s eyes.”—Erin Hollowell, Being Poetry, April 25, 2010 (read entire entry)

“Good heavens, what a book. No, rather good earth, good sad mortal body, what a book. Shumaker writes without blame, but with utter clarity and precision and story-telling skill about places on earth and our place among them—Alaska, Hawaii, the saguaro-studded desert—and about foxes, deer, swallows, who co-inhabit with us “under a sun / more agitated / this year than the last,” then about the father who wanted to fly, the mother who wanted to die. Finally she comes to her own brush with death. I couldn’t stop reading, sometimes weeping, always awed. Whatever Shumaker touches is thick with life, death, and the blessing of her words.”—Alicia Ostriker