Tehachapi Pass

There is much to delight one in David Shaddock’s trademark eleven-syllable sonnets: gems for the eye and ear, a remarkable tenderness in the poems of marriage and family, a way of writing about the political from direct personal experience.

—Alan Williamson, Warren Wilson College, author, Franciscan Notes and Dante and the Night Journey

In these times, David Shaddock’s ability to find meaning and consolation in the small events and encounters of our lives is an invaluable gift. With his consciousness sharpened and expanded by his longtime practice as a psychotherapist, he boldly but tenderly examines the dire challenges of living through this moment in time, packing insight after insight into a tonally diverse collection of forty-four sonnets. His subjects range from the mundane to the catastrophic, encompassing domestic life in long term marriage, to climate change, to meditations on grief and loss, to, in the books final section, personal retellings of the Psalmist’s longing for, and arguments with, God.

—Kate Daniels, Vanderbilt University, author, In the Months of My Son’s Recovery and Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Poetry and Psychoanalysis