Description
Consolation Prize
by Tyler Robert Sheldon
$14.99, paper
978-1-63534-628-2
2018
Tyler Robert Sheldon is the author most recently of Driving Together (Meadowlark Books, 2018). His writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the AWP Intro Journals Award, and has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Quiddity International Literary Journal, and other venues. Sheldon holds a BA and an MA in English from Emporia State University, is an MFA candidate at McNeese State University, and lives in Baton Rouge with his spouse and creative partner, the artist Alexandria Arceneaux.
Donald Levering –
The poems in Tyler Robert Sheldon’s Consolation Prize render the traumas of premature infant death and car wrecks into a beautiful music of grief and relatedness. The verses brim with imagination and wit, and, like the benevolent shark that appears in one of the poems, they show us a way through an unfixable human condition.
Denise Low –
Tyler Sheldon’s Consolation Prize shifts the prism of language to a modality of lyric vignettes. He tells tales of mortality, like that of his twin who died at birth. He celebrates beauty of rain and survival. About scars he writes, “some stretch to fit / the holes we make / in our hearts.” This poet pulls readers into a richly textured alternative reality that refracts wisdom.
Holly Walrath –
These poems are a journey into the dark space between life and human understanding of life. They explore trauma in delicate and yet deft ways, with a deep understanding of what it means to be human, imperfect, and broken but yet whole. A powerful little collection!