Outposts on the Border of Longing by Roberta Schultz

In this elegiac chapbook, singer-songwriter Roberta Schultz puts aside her guitar and drums in favor of lyrical lines that must make their music on the page, and they do. Here is a particular place and time rendered spare and vivid—Grant’s Lick—where Native American culture meets Wonder Bread and butterscotch pudding. By accumulating just the right quirky details, Schultz gives us a clear portrait of her rural Kentucky family in the middle of the 20th Century, living where it was still possible to walk in true dark and “feel the shape of the path with your feet.”

–Georgann Eubanks, author of the Literary Trails of North Carolina Series from University of North Carolina Press.

Roberta Schultz’s Outposts on the Border of Longing, her first book of poems, is written with a poet’s eye, a songwriter’s ear, and a raconteur’s nose for a story. Its poems poems tell the tales of a family’s journey from an urban neighborhood to a comparative rural “wilderness,” a girl’s journey to adulthood and a woman’s journey into poetry. Read it for its insights, its humor, its delight in language. Read it for the sheer joy of finding a poet who has something to say, and knows how to say it.

–Pauletta Hansel, author of The Lives We Live in Houses and other books.