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PRAISE:
With a stirring economy of words, Sharon Smith Shadrick delivers the rich scenes, scents, and disappointments of a 1960s child of Appalachia, the daughter of teenaged parents distracted by alcohol and depression. Still, the child springs up “like a daisy/ from a crack in the sidewalk.” She is a keen observer who turns her own tender memories of family into a salve for old wounds and a wise spirit of forgiveness.
–Georgann Eubanks, author of Rural Astronomy
Sharon Shadrick’s Housedresses is a meditation on growing up in the rough years of the 1970’s, from a fraught childhood in a fractured family into an adolescence filled with constant new hazards. Among the shag carpet and Sundays at the lake, the greatest threats in Housedresses come from men who can’t be trusted because they drink too much, don’t keep promises, and often have ulterior motives. But these very perils are what make survival worth celebrating.
–Denton Loving, author of Feller
The power of memory gathers the poems in Housedresses into a world the reader enters with empathy for the narrator, a young girl trying to survive the seemingly unsurvivable. Her life is filled with “alcohol-fueled / nightly chaos,” with an uncle who “pace[s] outside / the guest room where [she] hid[es],” and with a father’s promises made but never kept. But there is also joy in remembered childhood: going barefoot and ending up with “feet stained green from freshly cut grass [and the] air fragrant with wild onions,” and with a “long[ing] for orange shag carpet / in need of a rake” as she “absorb[s] the richness of …family.” This is a book the reader can return to time and time again to understand how one just sometimes must move through despair, how darkness can be turned into light. This is a book whose narrator first “floundered” but finally “dog-paddled [her] way back to shore,” to “a peaceful home, / the ordinary and mundane,” an ongoing search.
–Connie Jordan Green, Author of Nameless as the Minnows and other titles.
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