Unsuspecting Cinderella by Shyla Shehan

Unsuspecting Cinderella is what happens after the glass slipper slips on and the prince carries the poet off to the castle. These are pensive, incisive lines of deep hungers (I want you to want me like a fever breaking), and the Midas-like emptiness at the castle that leaves one curled into a ball and opening umbrellas on the inside. It’s the cautionary tale of compromising our truest self for a life that is both more than enough and nowhere near enough. A chapbook that reads like a novel written on a silver matchbook.

–Teri Youmans

Speaking to and for others who have risen from the commonplace into the exciting but fearsome American dream, Shyla Shehan “can’t even see myself” as she looks in the mirror, just a regular bathroom mirror. Life changes, and, in part two, the speaker of these poems is living in The Castle—watching, worrying, working to fit in and accept. Shehan’s powerful debut is honest, moving, and deeply instructive.

–Steve Langan

Shyla Shehan’s remarkable first collection, Unsuspecting Cinderella, packs a lot of punch in its thirty pages.  The poems of the first section track a female persona through the losses of love and the strangeness of life when one moves through it alone.  The second section follows that same persona into a world of new love and the oddly haunting burden of unexpected affluence.  Throughout, the poems are rich with vibrant language, surprising reversals, and insights into the difficulties of surviving emotionally in our stressful culture.  The collection is both entertaining and moving, not to mention philosophically engaging.  I look forward to seeing a lot more work by this accomplished poet.

–Jim Peterson, author of The Horse Who Bears Me Away