from Poetry Foundation
You're a lot less likely to hear elsewhere about another book I picked up in New York and have been reading in Boston, B. T. Shaw's This Dirty Little Heart: Shaw comes, I gather, from the part of Ohio that counts as Appalachia, though she now lives in Portland, and the fact that her title sounds like Steve Earle but in truth comes from Emily Dickinson should give you a sense of the way her best poems sound. The lesser poems (so far) are generic story-containing domestic lyric, but the better ones-- the ones that keep me reading-- have both the clipped twang of a regional speech (whether or not that region is her subject) and the depth that comes from reflection. The best poems concern family, either the one from which she comes, with its "red clay clay birds bird shot" and "wild ginseng night-gigging," or else the one (partly adoptive) in which she's the mom, as in "Sympathetic Response":
The sun turns to paste after two. Everything sticks--
cracker crumbs, tree muzz, kids. Dried bits
of what's past. Morning you write to-do lists
on your wrist-- nights, wash them into
the garden's cracked mouth. Late August,
yellow jackets frantic, brains squeezed
to BBs by kiddie pools, BBQs, season
suspicion: odds of surviving intact.
Fine scene-setting, unpretentious and yet exact speech... and if you read the whole poem, for which I don't have room, you'll see what happens (and what fine triple pun comes up) when she steps on a wasp.
—Stephen Burt
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