Each Wednesday, we feature a contemporary American poet with books in print that you can pick up at the library or your local bookstore. The genres range from street rap to sonnets and sestinas with everything in between. Poetry lives and breathes in our world today just as it always has. Support poetry in today”s world by reading today”s poetry.

Our Wednesday”s Poet this week is Aleda Shirley, a Mississippi poet who has published three books of poetry since 1986. Her first book, Chinese Architecture, won the Poetry Society of America”s 1987 Norma Farber First Book Award. Library Journal named it “highly recommended for contemporary collections” in a review published in 1986.

Her imagination takes us “beneath the surface” of the places opposing forces meet to reveal again and again “that an edge/ is never a simple or a sudden thing.” She is adept at using the specificity of nature to illuminate feelings of loss, desire, longing. Shirley pays close attention to craft, and her language resonates with an honesty and openness to experience that is both seductive and refreshing.

Shirley”s second book, Long Distance: Poems, was published by the Miami University Press in 1996. It was written in the years after the poet moved from Oklahoma to Mississippi, and reflects, she says, the upheavals that she felt during that time in her life. In her third book, Dark Familiar, was released May 1 by Sarabande Books, and has garnered praise from critics throughout the country. A sampling of the praise:

Aleda Shirley is a feline writer, stealthy and carnal and lush. In her first collection in nearly a decade, Shirley has staked her claims, the familiar, deeply human ones: that emptiness is permanent, that hope is tenuous, that connection is infinite, but that the body is exact in danger, prone to bad luck and to miracle—and all within that brutal, brave phenomenon where one is settling the debt of one”s terrestrial accounts. These narratives are harrowing, and hallowed, striking, dark, familiar, strange, and beautiful, and wise.” (Lucie Brock-Broido)

“I read Aleda Shirley”s Dark Familiar for the first time with the usual cautionary doubts, and the second time with a specific unease, then the third time with pleasure. Shirley is an invasive poet and when you feel you”re on the verge of the expected she surprises you. Dark Familiar is, simply enough, fine work.” (Jim Harrison)

Shirley has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Arts Council, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Mississippi Arts Commission. Aside from her three books, she has also published two chapbooks, Rilke”s Children (Larkspur Press) and Silver Ending, which won the Stanley Hanks Chapbook Competition of the St. Louis Poetry Society.

From the publisher:
There is a noir glamour to Shirley’s work—it satisfies our hunger for the sensual texture of existence. But there is also something new, here, where the objects of our desire seem suspended in a hushed emptiness . . . Parts of a story float up: there is a lover, long gone—the lovers met once on this bank, in this season, and no other—and though the love was historical, the affair is blurred, emblematic of our investment in the flickering life of the flesh. Immanence and transcendence switch on and off continuously, occupying the same ground, as if we view the textbook illusion of a woman’s face in profile, which in the next moment becomes the outline of a chalice.

Lush and sensual poetry, dark themes and richly detailed images all combine in Shirley”s poetry to make it memorable and haunting. Pick it up and read it at the beach or by the pool this summer.