Sorrel Summer Sky by Shelli Rottschafer

Author Shelli Rottschafer (she/her/ella) lives and writes in El Prado, New Mexico and Louisville, Colorado with her partner, Photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie. After years of teaching Spanish at a small Midwestern liberal arts college Shelli began her second act.  Sorrel Summer Sky is an example of this multi-media creativity.

 

PRAISE:

 

Sorrel Summer Sky could be mistaken for that which is sweet—after all, the speaker both undoes and parallels the James Wright “Blessing” while she looks at a sorrel roan by the roadside, or recalls a mother who guarded the cookie jar. But, look closer and she also “pine[s]/ to land [her] hands/like clawed question marks through [that horse’s] tresses.” This longing isn’t saccharine, but rather constructs a self-informed and complicated literary-ancestry. The poems are alive to earth joy and are an earth elegy as the language pays homage to Sappho, Terry Tempest Williams, Annie Dillard, Linda Hogan, Lauren Camp, Ocean Vuong. And of course, under all of this, the poet’s partnership with her husband, the photographer Daniel Combs, whose interspersed images continue a rustic conversation with her verse. His macro photos ask us to zoom in—on the prickly poppy, the prickly pear, the wavy trunk. Rottschafer’s lyric poems ask us to zoom in on the self in a body that both celebrates spring and mourns how many seasons we have left. “Look, where this has led you,” she writes, “to vertigo land within the vermillion/ shade of setting sun.”

 –Maya Jewell Zeller, author of Raised by Ferns

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Shelli’s debut collection Sorrel Summer Sky opens with a poem composed for Earth Day, a lamentation that names how we have fenced off and partitioned up the land, littered it, and fracked it open. These are walking poems, in the tradition of Wordsworth who rambled and wrote. These are nature poems, in tradition of Dickinson who closely observed and celebrated the world lifting up its wonders to our mind’s eye. Scattered, like wild flowers among her technicolor sonnets, sestina-adjacent poems, and Sapphic stanzas, are the black and white photos of her partner Daniel. This collaboration between a poet and a photographer calls us back to the wonder and beauty of this world. It reminds us that life itself is mutuality and that the only way forward is through an ethic of care.

–Jeremy Paden, poet & translator. World as Burning Sacred Heart, 2021.

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“Intelligence and knowing are two different things,” writes poet Shelli Rottschafer in “Equal Parts: Hydrogen to My Oxygen.” And though others may well cite “intelligent” facts about prickly pears, paddle cactus, orange globe mallow, lanternflies, sandhill cranes, and javelinas, Rottschafer knows them, encountering them with reverence, heart, and her lyric gifts. She sees sap oozing from a felled tree and takes it as a “blood sign of life,” evidence of nature’s drive toward renewal in the wake of disaster. “The hope is to heal,” she tells us in poems as healing as a hike through mountain wildflowers on a summer morning.

–Julie Kane, author of Naked Ladies: New and Selected Poems, 2025. Louisiana Poet Laureate 2011-2013.

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In “Shooting at the Stars,” about halfway through Sorrel Summer Sky, Shelli Rottschafer includes a line that could serve as a thematic statement for poems that immerse poet and reader in landscape: “There is more to heaven than just the skies.” Like the remarkable photographs that illuminate Rottschafer’s pages, these poems focus the eye on the flora and fauna of our mountain West. “What do we truly see / even when it is right before our eyes?” the poet asks. Here, we see it all.

–David Meischen, author of Caliche Road Poems, 2024.

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From the smallest detail of a prickly pear’s thorns to grand vistas, these poems attend to the natural world through the eyes of a nature writer—primarily  Shelli Rottschafer’s beloved, adopted northern New Mexico—observing change and, often, worlds of color. The black and white photographs by Daniel Combs are radiant in a different way; together, these poems and photographs document beauty, and bring readers a glimpse of a rich world of human connection to earth and sky. And, don’t miss the notes at the end, an integral part of the experience.

–Carol D Guerrero-Murphy, poet. Chained Dog Dreams, 2019 and Bright Path, Dark River, 2020.

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Sorrell Summer Sky walks the ridge line between the sublime drama of North America’s mountain west and the little daily traumas of living in the 21st century United States. In Rottschafer’s poems you sense the gnarled natural landscape, everything subtly alive and pulsing. Old, dammed-up rivers appear alongside John Deere tractors in the field, and her persistent and piercing gaze gives us poems about birds, stars, and wild horses. But the tensions of living in America today never disappear. These magic poems dwell in a thoughtfulness born in a persistent, unflinching gaze. Daniel Combs’s photographs punctuate these quietly intense poems, and remind us of what Rottschafer’s poems ask us to remember: the greatest gift of life is to see the world clearly, and with as much admiration and wonder as does this poet in her moving debut volume.

–Pablo Peischera, whose poetry appears in Pleiades, Shenandoah, & Copper Nickel.

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This collection of poems and photos, like the solid hair grown back over a roan’s scar, and swimming in the reflective pool of its healing and forgiving eyes, reminds us of life’s give and take. They are a composite of a journey where each word, each image, like every minute, has not been taken for granted. Perhaps, they are an offering of what others prefer to forget. Undeniably, they are a gift whose pages wing a woken mind escaping what once had been. They are for those who relish nature’s offerings and all which we choose to remember season after season, scar after scar, amidst the beauty in the landscapes of our lives.

–Levi Romero, Inaugural New Mexico State Poet Laureate, 2020-2023. In the Gathering of Silence 1996, A Poetry of Remembrance 2008, and Sagrado 2013.

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“For those who dare, dive, and dance / around her flood-tide, // she bears witness.” In her chapbook Sorrell Summer Sky, Shelli Rottschafer bears witness to a generous world in need of reciprocity. Rife with sensory details and speckled with evocative photographs, Rottschafer guides us toward what she sees: piñón, turquoise, felled trees, Perseids, and the threats encroaching on the landscapes we love.

–Erica Reid, winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize 2023. Author of Ghost Man on Second, 2024. Fort Collins Poet Laureate 2026-2028