No Charity in the Wilderness

Shaun T. Griffin has dedicated his life to creating a caring community. He and his wife, Deborah, founded the Community Chest in 1991, a nonprofit organization that directs more than thirty programs for northern Nevada, including hunger relief, service learning, counseling, drug and alcohol counseling, early childhood education, and art and social justice projects. Griffin taught poetry workshops at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center and published a journal of the inmates' work, Razor Wire. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Because the Light Will Not Forgive Me: Essays from a Poet and Anthem for a Burnished Land. In 2014, Griffin was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.

"No Charity in the Wilderness is an up-close, tender observation of the natural world and our place in it. The poems are compressed—like stones they tell the story of time. These are meditative verses that ask us to attend, to be present, and to open our hearts."—June Sylvester Saraceno, author of Feral, North Carolina, 1965"Shaun Griffin has dedicated his life to writing and community activism. No Charity in the Wilderness continues to expand upon his vision integrated into activism and human rights, sharing with his readers his faith in the power of words to build and transform community. From his resonant meditations on nature and our place in the universe to his searing witness to the harsh treatment of immigrants at our borders and of the unquiet souls abused by the prison system, Griffin crafts these articulate, deeply moving, lyrical poems. No Charity in the Wilderness should loft Griffin's literary reputation into company with William Stafford, Gary Snyder and Annie Dillard, as he is clearly one of the most powerful and spiritual voices of the new American West and beyond. These new poems are a conscience for our world."―Douglas Unger, author of Leaving the Land and Voices from Silence"Shaun Griffin travels the emotional wilderness of the American soul in his new collection, a wanderer open to both delight and suffering. The poet, echoing and alluding to, paying homage to, predecessors from Wang Wei to William Stafford, counts on language and landscape to deliver a confident identity, often to discover only mystery. As the title states, there may be No Charity in the Wilderness, but there is beauty, there is heart. This is a luminous work."—Scott Slovic, coeditor of Nature and Literary Studies"Shaun Griffin's world teems with desert and mountain, with sugar pine and finch, with fern and moss and sage. His world seethes with camps for refugees and internees, with Covid and caregivers, with convicts and wardens. Somewhere, everywhere in that beautiful yet overwhelmingly fraught world, "a person / lies waiting to be claimed." And—praise be— Griffin's poems rise in powerful response to that urgency. With lyric intensity and rich imagery, this poet who has taken "a vow to undo silence" creates a voice for those made voiceless. His deep compassion gives us a great gift: Griffin offers us an invitation to realize anew "how little we are without others."—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

• Cover PageWestern Literature and Fiction SeriesTitle PageCopyright PageContentsThe Moon OutsideBeyond the BorderIn the Waterless WestAcknowledgmentsAbout the Author