Guy Clark’s song “Cold Dog Soup” has two lines, “Ain’t no money in poetry/that’s what sets the poet free.” For that reason, I’m going to offer FREE SHIPPING on all U.S. orders for signed books for the foreseeable future. If you live outside of the United States, please pay $20.00 total for a book plus shipping.
The Children’s War and Other Poems, Beers’ second poetry collection from Salt Publishing, explores wars both literal and figurative, moving from global conflict to violence in mythology, domestic violence, and the war of disease ravaging the body. These poems act as a survival guide, showing that hope exists in even the darkest of places and that poetry is key to our healing.
FREE SHIPPING on all U.S. orders!
(Shipping discount on International orders)
| Shipping Options |
| Book = $15.95 Book + International Shipping $20.00 |
Read what other poets are saying about The Children’s War and Other Poems:
“Shaindel Beers’s The Children’s War and Other Poems is a poetry survival kit. It offers beauty and balance, provides necessary news of how to survive the war against innocence, how to start over — from a child’s point of view, and from a woman’s. The poems lend perspective that is both global and intimate. The children’s war, as we keep finding out, goes on not just in alien lands. It is the war at home. Yet voice is strength, too, and a marvelous poem like “Azure” is the antidote, a way of seeing hope, as if for the first time.” —Marilyn Kallet, author of “The Love That Moves Me”, director of the creative writing program, University of Tennessee.
“What Shaindel Beers offers us in this fine collection is a poetic humanizing and individualizing of the impersonal and ubiquitous violence that saturates the contemporary world. From a young Chechen girl who takes joy in the happiness she causes other passengers on the bus to a child drawing the cat she could not protect in the attack that killed her entire family, these poems show us unexpected reprieves from suffering alongside unfathomable new depths of horror. Given the ekphrastic nature of Beers’ project, we also feel something of the war journalist’s documentation in addition to the poetic humanizing effect. The combination is emotional and heady stuff. These poems are rare in that they have an aesthetic, emotional, and political impact in equal measure. You would do well to read them many times.” —Okla Elliott, author of From the Crooked Timber
In the title sequence of The Children’s War and Other Poems, an atelier of ekphrastic lyrics based on artworks by children from Chechnya, Darfur, and other recent war zones, Shaindel Beers tells us “There are things that can happen that you can’t draw.” Yet with gem-hard language and heartrending imagery, she confronts us with the unspeakable reality of “children being scattered / like a broken strand of brightly colored beads.” Beers joins the ranks of Edgar Lee Masters and Ted Kooser with her portraits of ordinary Americans, many of them women, devastated by physical and emotional hardship, but she enters risky and breathtaking territory all her own with her intimate portraits of domestic abuse and of her fears, as a new mother, that “violence is the one tool / I have been given.” Yet for all their darkness, the poems find hope: in memory, in everyday beauty, in the bonds of love. “This isn’t much, but it’s the gift,” Beers assures students at a reservation, “the one gift, these stories, that can’t be taken away.” Shaindel Beers’ poems place a moral burden upon us, one that can’t be taken away, but they offer the strength to bear it up. —Temple Cone, author of No Loneliness
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.
FREE SHIPPING now through 4/30 to celebrate National Poetry Month!
(Shipping discount on International orders)
| Shipping Options |
| Book + US Shipping $14.95 Book + International Shipping $20.00 |
Read what other poets are saying about A Brief History of Time:
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, winner of the Oregon Book Award in Poetry
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
When you place your order via PayPal, please contact Shaindel at shaindelr@yahoo.com to let her know how many copies of each book you are ordering and to specify to whom you would like your books signed.
Official Site of Shaindel Beers 