$19.99
Kristin Rajan‘s four long poems draw readers into a deep pool of memory where they encounter a voice that negotiates self with love, family, and loss. This voice is clear and strong and simultaneously vulnerable, creating a stark tension that propels readers through lines and images filled with candor and longing. Thoughtful readers will finish this book and be a different person than when they started.
–Kimberly K. Williams, author of Sometimes a Woman, winner of the 2022 WILLA Literary Prize in Poetry.
Kristin Rajan writes, “I am a loosened thread on the fringes of this tapestry.” Likewise, Shadows is woven with the shadows of memory—reconciling what we thought we knew with what we know now. Rajan’s work comes full circle with movement and maturity, a powerful trajectory that takes us by surprise in “Sundays and Shadows”: “But I don’t think he was looking at the trees / or the ornate shapes their shadows made on sidewalks.” At once familial and familiar, each celebration of life and death develops slowly like the shadows of film.
–Valerie A. Smith, author of Back to Alabama, a book of poems forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2024.
In four narrative poems written with gentle musicality, Kristin Rajan transports the reader into the isolation of growing up in a complicated family. Reflecting the narrator’s conflict, this is a book of contrasts, in which there is “darkness beneath color.” Through memorable images, Rajan conveys detachment and guilt from a young age and later loss and despair, “Who will keep the front door wide open?” We move with this author through vivid settings at different ages, the details lingering long after the final page. Rajan combines horror and softness in a way that invites the reader to look without judgement at our own blood relationships.
–Lisa Alletson, author of Good Mother Lizard, winner of the Headlight Review Poetry Chapbook Prize
Shadows
by Kristin Bryant Rajan
Paper
List: $19.99
979-8-88838-462-6
2024
Kristin Bryant Rajan, Ph.D. in English, writes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and literary criticism in Atlanta, GA. She is widely published in literary and creative writing journals and books and is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her literary research and creative writing revolve around meditative moments of deep self. She is a senior lecturer in English at Kennesaw State University.
Randi Strutton –
In Shadows, poet Kristin Bryant Rajan captures the often painful interplay between light and dark in the voice a narrator who describes haunting memories of her family celebrations and traditions. In four poems, the poet illustrates the narrator’s evolution from painful despair and helplessness as a child to peaceful understanding and compassion as an adult.
If you do not mind shedding a few tears—or a bucketful in my case—you will enjoy this short book of powerful images that evoke feelings of sympathy and empathy. I cry, for instance, when I picture the narrator at her 8th birthday party working hard to choke down her birthday cake as she hears her daddy’s car taking him away from their house and home. I cry when she realizes that her Sunday visitations with her father were miserable for both of them and that her beloved grandmother would never again give her “a hug that squeezes out the sadness.” Finally, I cry when the now middle-aged narrator helps her helpless father find relief from his pain, and I see that, indeed, “love abides/when people are loving.”
Shadows spoke to me in much the same way that a hauntingly beautiful work of music, or art, or cinema, or literature does. I plan to keep my copy on the shelf labeled “Catharsis.”
Randi Strutton –
In Shadows, poet Kristin Bryant Rajan captures the often painful interplay between light and dark in the voice of a narrator who describes haunting memories of her family celebrations and traditions. In four poems, the poet illustrates the narrator’s evolution from painful despair and helplessness as a child to peaceful understanding and compassion as an adult.
If you do not mind shedding a few tears–or a bucketful in my case–you will enjoy this short book of powerful images that evoke feelings of sympathy and empathy. I cry, for instance, when I picture the narrator at her 8th birthday party working hard to choke down her birthday cake as she hears her daddy’s car taking him away from their house and home. I cry when she realizes that her Sunday visitations with her father were miserable for both of them and that her beloved grandmother would never again give her “a hug that squeezes out the sadness.” Finally, I cry when the now middle-aged narrator helps her helpless father find relief from his pain, and I see that, indeed, “love abides/when people are loving.”
Shadows spoke to me in much the same way that a hauntingly beautiful work of music, or art, or cinema, or literature does. I plan to keep my copy on the shelf labeled “Catharsis.”