Consolation Prize

Tyler Robert Sheldon's newest chapbook Consolation Prize is a study in trauma and grief, as well as the work we do to surmount both. Poems here reflect the author's personal experiences with surgery and trauma, and abstractly reframe surgeries witnessed by Sheldon's friend Taryn Moller Nicoll (Program Coordinator of the Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery, former Artist in Residence for the LSU Neuroscience Center). Through discussions of mortality and how these issues shape our lives, Consolation Prize asks just what it is to be human and temporary.

"The poems in Tyler Robert Sheldon's Consolation Prize render the traumas of premature infant death and car wrecks into a beautiful music of grief and relatedness. The verses brim with imagination and wit, and, like the benevolent shark that appears in one of the poems, they show us a way through an unfixable human condition."
~Donald Levering, winner of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Poetry Prize and author of Coltrane's God

"Tyler Sheldon’s Consolation Prize shifts the prism of language to a modality of lyric vignettes. He tells tales of mortality, like that of his twin who died at birth. He celebrates beauty of rain and survival. About scars he writes, “some stretch to fit / the holes we make / in our hearts.” This poet pulls readers into a richly textured alternative reality that refracts wisdom."
~Denise Low, winner of the Red Mountain Press Editor's Choice Prize and author of Shadow Light

Tyler Robert Sheldon is the author most recently of Driving Together (Meadowlark Books, 2018). His writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the AWP Intro Journals Award, and has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Quiddity International Literary Journal, and other venues. Sheldon holds a BA and an MA in English from Emporia State University, is an MFA candidate at McNeese State University, and lives in Baton Rouge with his spouse and creative partner, the artist Alexandria Arceneaux.