VOICES OF THE ELDERS by Shelly Bryant
What I've always loved about Shelly's writing is the breadth of genres and periods in which she embeds her thoughts. There are few writers who will quite so fearlessly juxtapose classical Anglo-Saxon fantasies about fairies and dragons with ruminations on supernovae, historical fiction with futurism, cynical politics with whimsy. Voices of Elders is no exception in this regard and, like many of her other poetry collections, remains unfettered by temporal logic. Voices seems to mirror the human thought process, to revel in the limitless capacity of the imagination to weave impossible threads through distant fabrics, at times concerned only with the poignancy of images, and at times prodding the recesses of human behavior, our war, pride, sadness, and achievement. Hers is the writing of visceral experience as opposed to fabrication. It is a work with the nature of humanity in the face of mortality very much at its core.
. . . from the Introduction by Jason Gantenberg, WritingUp and Sloth Jockey