A Chorus of Strays

“I plunge into memory’s / sinkhole,” writes poet and singer-songwriter Roberta Schultz in her crackling new collection A Chorus of Strays, an eclectic menagerie of personalities, hearth songs, harmonies, gawky herons, craggy locust trees, distant stars, and prayers. Inside the world of words that Schultz has created, “none of the curtains / match,” and her characters “stomp spiritual tunes / while astronauts pace the silence in space.” Each offering provides a relishable cacophony of discovery, insight, reverence, confession, and witness. Schultz shows us how to find wonder where we least expect it.

—Kari Gunter-Seymour, Ohio Poet Laureate

If poetry is the art of putting into words the most intimate fragments of the human condition, Schultz’s book is poetry about poetry, and a portrait of us all. Memory, contemplation, politics, love, beauty, and even humor are the building rocks of these poems about those who wonder, become lost, deviate, or drift. Roberta knows that, like each human, each poem is part of a universal chorus that started at the beginning of time; and that each poem, like every human, is a cosmic stray. Her voice brings us together so we can not only hear, but be each other. Her words help every stray find sense and even joy in our condition. I ended my reading with the complete certainty that humanity itself is a bouquet of wanderers, a Chorus of Strays.

—Manuel Iris, Cincinnati Poet Laureate Emeritus

A chorus of forms lead us “through the slim porch portal” of nostalgia in Roberta Schultz’s new chapbook. At times, the poems plunge us “into memory’s / sinkhole” to hear dark “songs that end with questions,” or to interrogate the speaker’s relationship with her own art or her navigation of an existential map. The poems often converse with others’ creations, from Rothko’s paintings to an orb-weaver’s stubborn commitment to rebuilding. I love the breadth of characters in this chorus of strays: from herons to ticks, from carpenter bees to turtles, from larvae to bears. Through the fine jewelry of these poems, “we see each other / clear.”

—Katerina Stoykova, author of Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House