When You Get Here

Here's everything you want in poetry. Understandable language-check. Interesting, inventive use of words-check. Topics that reference matters of common interest-check. Insights way beyond the usual-check. Don't skim this collection. You'd miss way too much that makes our lives meaningful. Enter and walk "unafraid in this new topography."

Sharon Scholl, Professor emerita of humanities. Author of Music and Culture, Death and the Humanities, and three chapbooks of poetry

When You Get Here, is a celebration of the small, precise details that accumulate, like snowflakes, into a life. It's a map guiding us through a landscape of grief, wonder and sensuality, touching all the delicate connections in between. We peek in cupboards, wrestle with lovers, walk on thin ice, followed by a wolf. Every poem reminds the reader to breathe, sense, and feel what it is to be alive.

Joyce Sweeney, author of Impermanence and Wake up, Finishing Line Press, p> Here Shutta Crum's love of language takes us on a fascinating journey, gives us "Driving Directions," promises the road knows the way. She opens "Father's Cupboard,"lets us see what held his world. She studies "A Philosophy of Luminescence"in a confining marriage and offers new light. In the poem"You Can Have It Back," she wants to return the rib taken from Adam and given to woman, for it no longer holds her aright after the death of a poet friend. In "What I Bequeath," Shutta says one day her bones will speak a language we will understand. We are fortunate-in this beautiful collection, she speaks clearly to us and we understand.

Chris Lord, author of Field Guide to Luck and What We Leave, founder of Word'n Woman Press