The Shearing, Laura Altshul's new book, shows once again her poetic craft. Her final lines make you gasp and then immediately re-read the poems with fresh insight. In one of the book's first poems, "Company Car 1949," exotic trips in her dad's Oldsmobile 88 Rocket send a young girl into new orbits, undone by having to return to an apartment with "the landlord's / heavy tread above us." The line hints that doom may always be looming over us, the way Covid has. But in poems such as "Banging on the Balcony," "Pumping," and "The Shearing," Altshul's generosity of spirit and courage, incorporated in poems full of exquisite detail, remind us to keep giving: Noise is praise; breast milk is life; hair lost to chemo is shelter. Turn to The Shearing for shelter when Doom comes crashing down.

- Pegi Deitz Shea, two-time winner of the Connecticut Book Award, Vernon Poet Laureate

Woven as lovingly as a baby blanket, these poems trace the growing warmth from childhood into the cloak of adulthood with all its understandings and confusions. Personal history moves into admiration for other people's lives and life trials until coming to rest at the peace only nature can give. Depicting the grip of malicious intrusions, both worldwide disorder and one invading a woman's most intimate spaces, Laura Altshul's The Shearing shows just how vulnerable we can all become. Ready yourself and read it with the ones you love.

-D. Walsh Gilbert, author of Ransom and Peregrine (forthcoming)