Shapes That Stay

Shapes That Stay is a philosophical tour de force, combining profound insight, empathy, and wicked humor into poetic glimpses that reveal the joy and heartbreak of being mortal-and moral. Some would claim that a knowledge of science disenchants the world. These people haven't read Schnoeker-Shorb's poetry in which allusions to genetics, evolution, and physics are woven with metaphors of chemistry, ecology, and physiology to tenderly and brutally plumb the depths of being alive-and of dying. Humor, humility, honesty, and humanity. What more can one wish for in poetry?

-Jeffrey Alan Lockwood, Author of Prairie Soul: Finding Grace in the Earth Beneath My Feet ; Recipient of the Pushcart Prize and the John Burroughs Medal

In Shapes That Stay , the close scrutiny of human nature is drawn acutely, even as a scientist would look at the smallest forms of life or the most emotionally-moving human interactions. Yvette Schnoeker-Shorb's private thoughts become universal as she searches for understanding of what at first may appear to be mundane. This can be seen, for example, in her poem "Of Silk and Blossoms" in the line "Displacing life is risky." These poems do not back away from truth, in the natural world or in human experiences. They have the concise complexity of a Mary Oliver and the wisdom of an Emily Dickinson.

-John Garmon, Author of The Summer I Ran

Gentle humor and a consistently sincere and lyrical investment in the truths of the natural world combine with more personal poems reflecting worries over aging and mortality in Yvette Schnoeker-Shorb's Shapes That Stay . To love Nature, even as we understand its unforgiving eventualities, is a poignant lesson a careful reader may glean from this jewel of a chapbook, as in the poet's "About Do Not Feed Signs," in which the speaker cannot resist admiring the ravens who beg for food with their "irresistible cries," even though or perhaps because she understands what must soon drive them towards feasting on "the eggs of hysterical swallows."

-Joe Benevento, Poetry Editor, Green Hills Literary Lantern

The beauty of Yvette Schnoeker-Shorb's poetry is more than a genuine joy of nature and the embrace of all its forms, but an openhearted curiosity for our own true nature. The inquisitiveness of Shapes That Stay is determined and fearless. It encourages us to greet the necessary living and dying of our ever-astonishing selves with awe and gratitude.

-Paul Fericano, Author of The Hollywood Catechism