Carrie Shipers's poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, Connecticut Review, New England Review, North American Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. She is the author of Ordinary Mourning (ABZ Press, 2010) and the chapbooks Ghost-Writing (Pudding House, 2007) and Rescue Conditions (Slipstream Press, 2008).Cause for Concern is the winner of the 2014 Able Muse Book Award.
Carrie Shipers's magnificent endeavor aims to control the
uncontrollable. In her splendid collection Cause for Concern she
gives us her spirited poems-subversively satisfying in our era of
cool wordplay. Both her comfort with ambiguity and her sassy candor
aid the poet as she writes of a wife who is hoodwinked into a
necessary patience-one she both chafes from and rebels against
after her husband falls seriously ill. In rhythms that alternate
between hope and defeat, the poems track the illness, but also
punctuate the couple's changed world with quirky observations and a
scrappy spirituality. (Not to mention a canine companion.) Her
poet's craft, palpable in every arresting line, makes the subtlest
turns of vulnerability with enviable poise. -Molly Peacock, 2014
Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Paper Garden
Only a poet of unquestionable bravery and technical acuity could
rehearse the quotidian details of a middle class, middle aged
existence with such exquisite, irresistible and terrifying honesty.
-Kwame Dawes, author of Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems
If illness is a country inhospitable to guests, then Carrie
Shipers's second poetry collection, Cause for Concern, is our
guidebook, preparing us for what we will find in the waiting room,
by the bedside, in the bathroom, or on the skin when the gauze is
lifted. These are naked, open poems. They say things that make us
wince, as when we look at an incision still puckered and red.
Shipers reminds us that our lives must first be prodded and
cauterized, if the injured parts are ever to heal. -Jehanne Dubrow,
author of The Arranged Marriage
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