Shadows by Kristin Bryant Rajan

Kristin Rajan‘s four long poems draw readers into a deep pool of memory where they encounter a voice that negotiates self with love, family, and loss. This voice is clear and strong and simultaneously vulnerable, creating a stark tension that propels readers through lines and images filled with candor and longing. Thoughtful readers will finish this book and be a different person than when they started.

–Kimberly K. Williams, author of Sometimes a Woman, winner of the 2022 WILLA Literary Prize in Poetry.

Kristin Rajan writes, “I am a loosened thread on the fringes of this tapestry.” Likewise, Shadows is woven with the shadows of memory—reconciling what we thought we knew with what we know now. Rajan’s work comes full circle with movement and maturity, a powerful trajectory that takes us by surprise in “Sundays and Shadows”: “But I don’t think he was looking at the trees / or the ornate shapes their shadows made on sidewalks.” At once familial and familiar, each celebration of life and death develops slowly like the shadows of film.

–Valerie A. Smith,  author of Back to Alabama, a book of poems forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2024.

In four narrative poems written with gentle musicality, Kristin Rajan transports the reader into the isolation of growing up in a complicated family. Reflecting the narrator’s conflict, this is a book of contrasts, in which there is “darkness beneath color.” Through memorable images, Rajan conveys detachment and guilt from a young age and later loss and despair, “Who will keep the front door wide open?” We move with this author through vivid settings at different ages, the details lingering long after the final page. Rajan combines horror and softness in a way that invites the reader to look without judgement at our own blood relationships.

–Lisa Alletson, author of Good Mother Lizard, winner of the Headlight Review Poetry Chapbook Prize