Christy Shepard grew up in Minnesota and came to San Francisco in the early 70’s as a hippy, a feminist, and budding poet. After many decades in the helping professions as both a nurse and psychotherapist, she became an adoptive mother in her late 40’s, in her words “ever a late bloomer.” Her early experiences as an adoptive parent, as well as her deep love of the natural world, have shaped and infused her poetry. She has won honorable mentions in The MacGuffin Magazine and Bay Guardian Poetry Contests. Her work has been published in Persimmon Tree Literary Magazine, Local Gems Press, Celestial Arts Press, Manic D Press, and she won an annual Littoral Press Broadside contest. She is a long-time student of Kathleen McClung of The Writing Salon, and currently lives in Berkeley, CA.
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PRAISE:
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–Angie Minkin, author of Balm for the Living and Lineage Songs (forthcoming)
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Christy Shepard paints with words. “Two sets of long underwear hang on the line / by a broken shack with blue shutters / a single sign of Siberian life.” Who wouldn’t read poetry like this? Shepard evokes the natural world while plumbing the depths of her interior life. I was riveted from start to finish by her book’s intensity, tenderness, and imagery.
–Martina Reaves, author of I’m Still Here
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In this luminous collection, Christy Shepard confides in us readers—as in, she entrusts to our safekeeping, our care and protection, tender yet incandescent poems of “a child insomniac who welcomed morning,” a mother who holds close a keening daughter all afternoon, a neighbor unscrewing a jar of olives despite his tremor. These exquisite poems span regions and seasons—Minnesota winter light outside a hospital, summer heat on a Mendocino dock, rainfall in Siberia, the Northern Lights over Vermont—and each one meditates eloquently on our complicated humanity, on “the nature of donation/who gives, who receives.” Savor again and again the gift of Christy Shepard’s wise and steady poems, quietly bracing revelations, all of them “small promises against the dark night.”
–Kathleen McClung, author of Climbing the Fire Escape, Flipping the Raft: Poems on Women in Movies and Questions of Buoyancy
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