Deep Inside that Rounded World

"This is all a year is" Carriger tells us and then embarks on a collection of poems that deftly encompass and reflect upon the moments that comprise our lives. From a story of Samuel Morse to the image of a modern boy staying after class to soak up the attention of a teacher, she places historical events next to modern pieces and invites us to think not only of our own lives but of what time has meant to others because "[e]verything goes in time". This collection gives voice to those often left voiceless, like Sarah and Delilah from the Old Testament, Christine Keeler, Angela de Foligno, and Persephone who confesses, "The terrible truth of the underworld / is that it is not terrible at all." These poems are "Suspension bridges [that] grow out like climbing vines" inviting us to marvel at what holds us all together during our time Deep Inside that Rounded World.

     -Jamie Lynn Heller, author of Domesticated; Poetry From Around the House (Finishing Line Press) and Buried in the Suburbs, a 2019 Kansas Notable Book of the Year (Woodley Press)

Shannon Carriger writes with empathy and eloquence of the "inevitable wreckage" of time, history, and war; she tenderly exposes hearts "bruised or brushed" by love, fear, and regret. Deep Inside that Rounded World is memorable, nuanced, fresh, stunning.

     -Linda M. Lewis, author of Ensemble: Poems (Spartan Press) and Professor Emerita of English, Bethany College

The poems in Shannon Carriger's debut collection Deep Inside that Rounded World often suture history to a single, human life-one left out of our more public, official narratives. We aren't looking closely enough at the world-not at our shared pasts, not at the present, and certainly not the way the poet does in these sharp, impressively referential poems, ranging from Shoichi Yokoi, to Hannah Duston, to Persephone. In one stunning poem from the collection the public views a 1964 photograph of Marianne Faithful and merely perceives the singer "as a cold, closed thing," missing entirely "...a refraction of the light / above and within...". These poems follow the light no matter how it bends, or through what stubborn materials. They do not flinch.

     -Ben Cartwright, author of After Our Departure (Sage Hill Press) and The Meanest Things Pick Clean (Floating Bridge Press)