Description

 

Shelter in Place

by Shawn Pittard

The pandemic made our worlds physically smaller. It limited our ability to come and go as we pleased. While events like these can create a kind of restless cabin-fever, they also provide us with opportunities to look deeply into the familiar and into ourselves. Shawn Pittard invites us to explore our own backyards, our neighborhoods, our local waters—to discover the small gods and ordinary mysteries that will reveal themselves to the patient observer.

Early Praise:

In his timely new collection, Shawn Pittard explores what it means to shelter in place—to take refuge/stay in a safe place while the world goes on around you, while the usual pleasures and beauties of an interconnected daily life become like an active hive of questions and desire buzzing inside. Now/ is the past the earth revolves around/ and away from. The poems make their way, as we all must, through the labyrinth to the pandemic’s end, where Oil futures were our futures again./ The lonely still looked to the moon. So too these poems, like koans, shine a contemplative light.

—Susan Kelly-DeWitt, author of Frangible Operas

Shawn Pittard’s poems arrive as little astonishments, bearing witness to the pandemic’s fervent uncertainties. Alternately a quest: I beat the brush, unsure/ of what it is I’m looking for, as well as a questioning: What are we to know?/ Who are we to say?, the poems ride time’s river, urging readers to Launch your little boat/ into night’s current./ Dare to close your eyes. Pittard’s self-effacing wisdom coupled with his spare, radiant language reminds us that even in the face of decay and inevitable death we can be consoled by the everyday miracles and wonders of the natural world.

—Moira Magneson, author of In the Eye of the Elephant

Shelter in Place gathers poems written when the entire world was turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic and, for a time, went eerily silent. Pittard’s poems are about hunkering down, not knowing what to expect next, the need to return to what was normal, questioning one’s god. The realization that, as in “The Cat,” nature will take those we love.

—Danyen Powell, facilitator, The Sacramento Poetry Center’s Tuesday Night Poetry Workshop

About the Author

Shawn Pittard is the author of three slender chapbook volumes of poetry: Witness, which was a Finalist in The Poetry Box 2024 chapbook contest; Standing in the River, the winner of Tebot Bach’s 2010 Clockwise Chapbook Competition; and These Rivers from Rattlesnake Press. He’s been a coach for Poetry Out Loud and a California Poet in the Schools, taught recitation and writing in middle schools and high schools, including juvenile hall (yep, they’re good kids), as well as with veterans and the men in Folsom Prison. By day, he labored in the field of environmental protection, planning, and public policy, focusing on energy.