Shaindel Beers

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Biographical note:  Shaindel Beers’ poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, in Eastern Oregon’s high desert and serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary (www.contrary
magazine.com). She hosts the talk radio poetry show Translated By, which can be found at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/
onword.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715053
ISBN:  9781844715053
Author:  Shaindel Beers
Title:  A Brief History of Time
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Feb-09
Extent:  76pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  114 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  A Brief History of Time, Beers’ first collection of poetry, is at once an exploration of what it is to grow up in rural America and a treatise for social justice. These poems, many of them award-winning, span a wide range of styles—from plainsong free verse to sestinas to nearly epic works.

The characters/speakers in Beers’ poems range from the rural working class to mythological characters. These poems look at the world with an honest, unflinching eye. She is one of the up-and-coming poets from Generation X we will be hearing a great deal from in the future.

Cyclone Virtual Book Tour:

Table of contents:
A Brief History of Time
Would you know me
First Love
Elegy for a Past Life
Red Heifer
Stretching out that fifteen minutes
Triptych — The Light, The End, The Light
A Man Walks Into a Bar
Why Gold-digging Fails
"HA?!"
The Thermophobic's Wife
Sleep
Sleeping Man and Woman, Circa 2000, C.E.
For Stephen Funk, in Prison for Protesting
the Iraq War
Sunday Worship
Fitriani in front of her house . . .
Last Train from the City
Summer 2000 Sestina
Rebuttal Evidence
A Letter to Aya Ishibashi
Why It Almost Never Ends with Stripping
To CKC, Stillborn, April 22, 2006
Overview of the Carbon Cycle
Rewind
A Study in Weights and Measures
Surgery
Body Shop
What Will We Do With You? This Bone Has
Almost No Flesh Protecting It —
Wind Advisory
In a Top Drawer
Cicadas
My Love, A Partial Explanation
Flashback
Taking Back the Bra Drawer
Mother
Moonlight Sestina
Branching
The Calypso Diaries
Belonging
Outdoor Cafe, Lake Mary, FL
Omens
Return
Weekend Rain Ghazal
I Give You Words
Because You Are In It
Tonight in this hotel room's mirrored wall . . .
How Time Betrays Us

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Excerpt from book:  

Cicadas

Where will we be the next time
they emerge, in 17 years,
when brood X nymphs first wriggle their way
out of exit holes, climb the trunks of oaks and maples,
sun themselves on viburnum,
pale and helpless, before their wings dry
and darken
so they can fly safely to trees to mate, lay eggs,
and die?
I'm not sure I have a concept of 17 years.
I remember Ronald Reagan was President,
I was jealous of my friend Lindsey because
she had a Debbie Gibson hat.
The Princess Bride came out, and is still
my favorite movie.
Seventeen years in the future seems daunting.
The boys at the little league field behind my house
will be men, the neighbors’ dog will be dead
and the tree in my backyard
will no longer be mine.
I could be living anywhere—
not one to put down roots, I can't even guess.
Just yesterday, I realized, looking out your window,
that in less than two months
new trees will greet me from another window.
No longer the canopy of hardwoods,
but lush, tropical greens year-round
1,300 miles away from you.
And though we've talked about this,
I wonder what you're thinking,
what you would like to be doing
with the seventeen years that this year's
nymphs will spend underground,
burrowing, living on the roots of all those trees.

Unpublished endorsement:  A Brief History of Time promises scope and Shaindel Beers delivers. Her strong first book goes beyond the farm girl who escapes and has love affairs. This young woman writes poems crammed with the beauty, irony, and sadness of the world: crummy jobs, meanness, illness, loss, and all the perspective they bring. The free verse is crafted and the sestinas are strong narratives. As Beers says in one poem, “I try to use old words…and make them say new things.” She succeeds!

Penelope Scambly Schott, author of A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in Poetry

Unpublished endorsement:  There is an intimate immensity, as Gaston Bachelard called it, in Shaindel's vision. Her poems are meeting places where the personal and the cosmic touch, where the body and the sky seem to inhabit the same skin. They are poems that take you to "worlds you / have never known," as she says in one poem, because we have never seen them the way this exciting young poet has. The difficulty is that this world is always in flux and it is the job of these sometimes formal, sometimes freely drawn poems, to give us this world in a language that extends beyond the moment, something she accomplishes by quick turns and associations. As she suggests in her opening poem, she is out "to change / history, by writing these untruths" that turn out to be truths of the heart, the truths of a truly remarkable and valuable poetic vision.

Richard Jackson

Unpublished endorsement:  The stories in these poems are as sinuous as the syntax that threads them, stitching together an autobiography whose questions of gender, race, and class remain open, while the poems containing them are as strong as the steel door of time.

Natasha Sajé, author of Red under the Skin, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Bend, winner of the Utah Book Award for Poetry.