In “Ten Hours to Tulsa,” Nation-Watson revisits growing up in Tulsa, a Hank Williams/Jerry Falwell/Step-parent/belt buckle place where the speaker clearly states “I don’t belong.” With the river as a “wasteland for memories” and home being “an idea far removed from her dream,” Nation-Watson renders sharp portraits of the people and places that formed a life, one that the speaker can remember and yet “keep driving.”
–Donna Vorreyer, the author of three full-length collections of poetry: To Everything There Is(Sundress Publications, 2020),Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016), and A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013)
“Poet Shelley Nation‘s chapbook10 Hours to Tulsa invites the reader on a road trip towards her beginnings. People and places are sketched in spare lines. Yet, these are lyric poems, not narrative. The use of inventive wordplay, shifting rhythms, and the persona form charge the personal imagery with emotional resonance. She asks what feelings from memories or dreams still connect to this place and these people, and how those feelings have changed and shifted. There’s heartbreak and humor, but no unearned sentiment — as if Patsy Cline had ever met up with Joy Harjo over a bourbon, neat.”
—Chicago poet Elizabeth Marino is the author of Asylum (Vagabond, 2020), the chapbook Ceremonies (dancing girl press) and Debris (Puddin’head Press), and a Pushcart Prize nominee.
In her stellar chapbook 10 Hours to Tulsa, Shelley Nation, a long-time, familiar presence in the Chicago poetry scene, reconnects with her Indigenous roots on the page, as well as in the flesh, having returned to her native Oklahoma. It’s apropos then, that these poems feel like a kind of personal guidebook to survival. With these vivid and detailed portraits, including “Uncle Harold,” “The Trailer Next Door,” “Reuben,” “A Friend from Bartlesville Comes to Visit,” “Everclear,” and “Unmentionables,” Nation has deftly created what amounts to a literary art gallery.
–Gregg Shapiro, author of Refrain in Light
Shelley Nation offers readers her bitter Oklahoma accounts of growing up inside a dysfunctional home where her soul’s refuge was to engage in adult imaginings which made it possible to escape with the assistance of the same potions and positions that bled into agony. Her solace was in her power to play and disguise herself while alone or with a confidant neighbor girl. Nation’s narrator is pulled by two huge magnets of her mother’s incendiary screams and father’s inebriated neglect and regrets. I was totally captivated by the poem “Uncle Harold” its tone and cadence captured in the character’s approach to a grand capricious life in a language worthy of a short film. There’s some familial trauma similar to what poets Sharon Olds and Sylvia Plath would have recognized, but Nation’s take is grittier and more country.
–Carlos Cumpian, author of Human Cicada (Prickly Pear Publishing)
10 hours to Tulsa is a crafty set of poetry that conjures up a working class, wrangler jean wearing, cowboy-booted Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz who drinks her whiskey straight and steals the cigarette from you after you light it. Not quite romanticized but lived experiences that feel as real as lipstick left on the rim of a glass.
–Andrea Change – Executive Director of Chicago’s Guild Literary Complex
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