Shape and Shadow by Linda McClure Dunn

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” according to William Faulkner. For Linda Dunn, Faulkner’s statement becomes a shaping mantra as she moves through memories of her grandmother “[making] do with what was at hand, / [piecing] memories together like scraps in her quilts,” to the author as child watching the pussy willow where “no kittens grew,” and on to images of those first days at college, freshman women who wish to be individuals but are “yet all alike / in cuffed socks, dirty bucks, or penny loafers / [s]nug sweater sets and straight wool skirts.” The memories are bound together by a consideration of the difficulty of choices—irreversible paths one takes that can never be undone—choices that become a red thread stitching the poems into the story of a life.

–Connie Jordan Green, author of Household Inventory, Winner of the Brick Road Poetry Prize

“Who are my people?” Linda Dunn asks, and it’s an important question in SHAPE AND SHADOW. But the real interrogation of this collection is that of singular identity—one marked, as we all are, by the dreams of a prior generation; by coming to grips with youthful frustrations; and by the constraints and obligations of love and relationships. In poems that hold metaphorical gems (“Repairs Needed”), wordplay in haiku (“Early Disillusion”), and revelations sudden as a rainstorm (“Capitulation”), Dunn probes her “twitching roots” to unearth a mature contentedness and perspective on life, regret, the creative force, and “what must change.”

–Kory Wells, HEAVEN WAS THE MOON