SMALL FRY by Jacquelyn Shah

Through a poetic lens impacted by childhood isolation that led to a deep understanding of the pathos surrounding humanity, Jacsun Shah knits Small Fry. Sometimes terse, often humorous, and always compassionate, she has fashioned a brilliant and incisive collection of poems reflecting the world in which we live.

–Sehba Sarwar, author of Black Wings, a novel of transgression and redemption.

In Jacquelyn Shah’s book, Small Fry, the reader is treated to poems that range widely in subject, yet circle essential matters of growing up, understanding power and powerlessness, and family in all its permutations.  There are poems for a lost brother, a speaker’s real children compared with a sister’s dolls, a father’s puzzles and an uncle’s complicated attention.  Shah’s style mixes Oulipian methods in “Crazy Eights, A Little Lost” with the two shaped columns found in the poem “Snowmen’s Eyes” and the wing-like “To A Damselfly.” Throughout there are touchstones of childhood found in forbidden candy, the menace of a neighborhood bully, a fascination with circus freaks and the carnival, and a “jack-out-of-the-box.”  This sure voice takes the reader through scenes which captivate, as the ending poem, “Go Wish Upon Yourself” insists: leave the boundaries of preconceived notions to create one’s own perspective, high above the stars.

 — Dr. Elline Lipkin, author of The Errant Thread, poems.