Peggy Shumaker – författare

Just Breathe Normally opens with a traumatic accident. Shattered perceptions and shards of narrative recount the events, from wreck through recovery and beyond. In lyric prose, the stories spiral back through generations to touch on questions of mortality and family, immigration and migration, legacies intended or inflicted. In the wake of her near-fatal cycling collision, Peggy Shumaker searches for meaning within extremity. Through a long convalescence, she reevaluates her family's past, treating us to a meditation on the meaning of justice and the role of love in the grueling process of healing. Her book, a moving memoir of childhood and family, testifies to the power of collective empathy in the transformations that make and remake us throughout our lives. We all live with injury and loss. This book transforms injury, transforms loss. Shumaker crafts language unlike anyone else, language at once poetic and profound. Her memoir enacts our human desire to understand the fragmented self. We see in practice the power of words to restore what medical science cannot: the fragile human psyche and its immense capacity for forgiveness.

Savoring Alaskan landscapes by way of birch trees has become Kes Woodward s trademark. This collection brings together thirty years of his birch portraits and forest close-ups. Over those same thirty years, poet Peggy Shumaker has traveled inner landscapes via images drawn from two deserts the Sonoran and the Subarctic. Her poems embody the harsh beauty of heat and cold, the force of true extremes. Wounded trees, marked paths, slashes of color. Bursts of passions, licks of flame. The sensual spirits of two imaginations at work fuel this this volume.

Savoring Alaskan landscapes by way of birch trees has become Kes Woodward s trademark. This collection brings together thirty years of his birch portraits and forest close-ups. Over those same thirty years, poet Peggy Shumaker has traveled inner landscapes via images drawn from two deserts the Sonoran and the Subarctic. Her poems embody the harsh beauty of heat and cold, the force of true extremes. Wounded trees, marked paths, slashes of color. Bursts of passions, licks of flame. The sensual spirits of two imaginations at work fuel this this volume.

From wildfire and war to bleached reefs and human frailty, Peggy Shumaker's new poems meditate on mortality. Her poems speak with elegiac force for lost languages, lost ancestors, lost ways of being. This work sharpens the edges of our perception, drawing on the inner life, on secrets that keep us alive. With language as lyrical as the natural world, the poems in Gnawed Bones nourish us.

What happens when we enter unfamiliar realms, when we open ourselves to the unknown? Sometimes that not-knowing makes art possible. In Toucan Nest, the eighth book by Alaska State Writer Laureate Peggy Shumaker, her first vivid encounters with the rainforests of Costa Rica—with its basilisk lizards, bats, and bromeliads, its crocodiles, sloths, and strangler figs—refresh and renew our world in a work of startlingly beautiful mindfulness and imagination.

Chosen with care, this volume represents forty years of poems and prose by Peggy Shumaker. Her distinctive cadences give voice to landscapes and people of Alaska and Arizona. This work leads us deep into what remains unresolved, savoring mysteries of heart, mind, and soul. Matters of life and death, these poems embody exuberance and struggle and generosity.

What happens when we enter unfamiliar realms, when we open ourselves to the unknown? Sometimes that not-knowing makes art possible. In Toucan Nest, the eighth book by Alaska State Writer Laureate Peggy Shumaker, her first vivid encounters with the rainforests of Costa Rica—with its basilisk lizards, bats, and bromeliads, its crocodiles, sloths, and strangler figs—refresh and renew our world in a work of startlingly beautiful mindfulness and imagination.

Still Water Carving Light tenderly navigates the depths of loss and memory. How does the awareness of death shape the ways we live? What language brings us deep into questions we can never resolve? Elegies open us, challenge us, sometimes restore us. In these elegiac poems, Peggy Shumaker honors those gone before us, those nearly done, and the unending life we pass on. With compassionate insight, Shumaker reminds us that while grief endures, it can be embraced, allowing for profound growth and deeper understanding.