“…may be surprised at the poignancy and compassion of her poetry,” writes the incomparable Eve Tushnet, at the new online home of Crisis magazine.
I’m beyond flattered. It’s always nice to feel understood:
“There’s that same Eliot retreat into double-tongued muttering (‘Can’t close the window in time’ does much the same work in Shaidle’s poem that ‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME’ does in ‘The Waste Land’) and the same obsessive sifting through the past, endlessly seeking, hoping that this time the half-remembered lost object will be found. And Eliot, too, was preeminently a poet of the Fall. (…)
“Illness, physical pain, and humiliation; people for whom God is an inescapable and often anguished question, not an answer; but also art, contemplation, the ability to accept an unbearable situation with humor and grace. (Shaidle manages to capture the humor St. Therese deployed against herself and her canonizers.) She’s Hopkins with fistfights, Paglia without the self-absorption of ersatz paganism, Patti Smith at Midnight Mass. Her poetry is broken the way hearts are broken.”
It’s also quite humbling to see my book
