A SHADE I CANNOT NAME by Carol Traynor Mayer

Carol Traynor Mayer received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.  Her work appears in Allium: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Saw Palm. Traynor Mayer is a member of Cambridge Common Writers.

PRAISE:

In Carol Traynor Mayer’s masterful debut, A Shade I Cannot Name, presence and absence, place and placelessness, delicately, fleetingly commune. “Workers abandon the job, / for winter, that isn’t winter / at all,” she writes. Traynor Mayer challenges the world she presents and pursues an elusive question, “Must everything be likened / to something else to matter?” She employs a mere six similes with language paradoxically lush and spare. Take a flashlight to her half-dark rooms; sink into the vulnerability she offers. This poetry is a hauntingly original search for meaning and more.

–Alison Palmer, author of Bargaining with the Fall