Braided by Leslie Shiel

In this collection you will find nuns and men in collars, as well as a fortune teller, a pet goldfish, and a sock monkey. These are poems of girlhood and deathbeds, poems concerned with safety, and story, and speaking up. Their strength lies in Leslie Shiel‘s emotional accuracy and truth telling, in the interplay between her clear-minded sensibility and her yearnings, and in her willingness to see and name both the difficulties and the comforts of human relationships. At the heart of these poems are family history, friendships among women, a patient kind of longing, and “stars/ trapped in damp ceilings.” Shiel has learned from the grandmother she writes of how to work knots and to untangle, and she lays her untanglings out for us in a way that is moving, and recognizable, and oh so pleasurable. She is a poet moved by experience and mystery, and her beautiful, important poems will call us back to them again and again.

–Tara Bray, author of Small Mothers of Fright and Mistaken for Song

Giving voice to our true selves requires facing down fears about consequences or what the future holds. In Braided, Siel captures this struggle with tender and compelling insight, depicting a journey that can require harsh reckoning. Like Shiva, we must both destroy and create in the process. Shiel’s own voice shows us the reward can be great–a teller of truths for both herself and others, she “untangles fears” and “lays them out.”

–Kathy Davis, author of Holding for the Farrier

In the midst of life’s thunder, in times of trouble and uncertainty, facing the suffering of others or our own trials, to what do we turn, to whom do we listen? The voices of our education (religious, parental) may instruct us in how to avoid suffering, but how do we learn to listen to hte voices of our bodies–“dare I call them radiant?” asks Leslie Shiel. These poems position us fearlessly in moments of suffering which are also, when seen clearly, moments of insight, creativity, and vision. In their accumulated wisdom, the poems inBraided say in one voice: “Go on. Be strong.” They tell us to embrace ourselves and each other and to live our common life.

–Margaret Gibson, author of (most recently) One Body, Second Nature, Broken Cup