COMING IN 2010

      from Red Hen Press

GNAWED BONES

   Good heavens, what a book. No, rather    good earth, good sad mortal body, what a book. Shumaker writes without blame, but with utter clarity and precision and story-telling skill about places on earth and our place among them--Alaska, Hawaii, the saguaro-studded desert—and about foxes, deer, swallows, who co-inhabit with us “under a sun / more agitated / this year than the last,” then about the father who wanted to fly, the mother who wanted to die. Finally she comes to her own brush with death. I couldn’t stop reading, sometimes weeping, always awed. Whatever Shumaker touches is thick with life, death, and the blessing of her words.

   Alicia Ostriker, author of No Heaven

         and The Book of Seventy