Consolation Prize by Tyler Robert Sheldon

Tyler Sheldon’s Consolation Prize shifts the prism of language to a modality of lyric vignettes. He tells tales of mortality, like that of his twin who died at birth. He celebrates beauty of rain and survival. About scars he writes, “some stretch to fit / the holes we make / in our hearts.” This poet pulls readers into a richly textured alternative reality that refracts wisdom.

–Denise Low, author of Shadow Light, Red Mountain Press Editor’s Choice Prize winner

The poems in Tyler Robert Sheldon’s Consolation Prize render the traumas of premature infant death and car wrecks into a beautiful music of grief and relatedness. The verses brim with imagination and wit, and, like the benevolent shark that appears in one of the poems, they show us a way through an unfixable human condition.
–Donald Levering, winner of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize and author of Coltrane’s God and The Water Leveling with Us