What Others Are Saying
About The Shape of Today:
This book is a nice serving of tasty poetry, full of the realities of life. It’s a case where eating words, the poet’s, is a really satisfying experience. Not only will you find the poet introducing you to soft, sweet peaches but to many fascinating, tough, tangible people. A good read!
Valerie’s poems are loaded with electric ah ha’s that, as one line reads, ooze gold over slow silver. You won’t need money to dream, honey, your mind will dance like calories on fire and you may Change your shoes, change your life as you encounter tactfully massaged working class jargon in verve filled poems that will rivet you . . . like finding a had-to have at an Estate Sale.
The Shape of Today is like Instagram in words. Valerie Macon’s new collection evokes all the senses from “sugar sand” and “a gut-slicked hand” to “Priscilla curtains (that) lift and fall with a breeze.” These real-life snapshots preserve moments worthy of poetry. There’s food for thought here as a woman sorts and gobbles M&Ms, a matron tosses the remains of her Taco Bell feast on the asphalt, workers sweat, and nature struggles.
“. . . Your poems are packed with levels of meaning–they are a source of new insight every time they are read. The people in them are individuals we have all known, as recognizable as our own faces when we look into a mirror.”
Thomas Graves has put together a list of top 100 poetic fragments–”fragmentary glimpses of hot”– gleaned from poems that appear in the Best American Poetry Book 2015. Although Blank Canvas is not included in the BAP, a poetic fragment from this poem is listed as number 26 of top the top 100: coats fat over lean with a bright brush.