Shutta Crum's Blog, page 3

Hairy Toe Halloween Cookies

Wondering what to serve your vampirish visitors on All Hallows Eve? Why not some hairy toe cookies! And if you’ve got a copy of Who Took My Hairy Toe? why not a little read aloud before your ghouls go out begging?

Here’s the recipe via a dear friend who devised it for me. Enjoy!

Shutta

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Running Doesn’t Matter Poem by Shutta Crum

Thank you, Nicole Birkett and the folks from MAKING WAVES poetry journal for publishing my poem “Running Doesn’t Matter.” It’s a lovely publication!

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Wordsmith’s Playground Back Issues: 2021

December 2021 issue: https://mailchi.mp/c5fd9e89f370/wordsmiths-december-playground-5688840

November 2021 issue: https://mailchi.mp/da281b3dba1a/wordsmiths-november-playground-5673204

October 2021 issue: https://mailchi.mp/7c845e6c22d2/wordsmiths-october-playground-5661100

September 2021 issue: https://mailchi.mp/45aa5b829209/wordsmiths-september-playground-5646372

August 2021 issue: https://mailchi.mp/7e04a41c4b73/wordsmiths-august-playground-5630176

July 2021 issue: https://mailchi.mp/df8a8489b004/your-july-news-from-shuttas-wordsmiths-playground-5554552

June 2021 issue: https://mailchi.mp/66de2d615f58/your-june-news-from-shuttas-wordsmiths-playground-5534612

May 2021 issue: http://mailchi.mp/2609aa2981d1/your-may-news-from-shuttas-wordsmiths-playground-5522160

April 2021 issue: http://mailchi.mp/ef8d47a481ef/your-april-news-from-shuttas-wordsmiths-playground-4654476

March 2021 issue: http://mailchi.mp/6cfb1eb428ba/your-march-news-from-shuttas-wordsmiths-playground-3745908

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Poem by Shutta: In a House Above Which UFOs were Sighted in 1966

Enjoy this poem from Shutta’s book: WHEN YOU GET HERE (Kelsay, 2020).

And here’s a recent review of WHEN YOU GET HERE.

Shutta

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Review of When You Get Here

A new review of WHEN YOU GET HERE by Neil Leadbeater has appeared and I am so moved. One never knows how others are going to take the writing you’ve poured your soul into. But this review of my first poetry book just came out, and it’s left me stunned. To have my wolf poem compared to Mary Oliver’s writing!!! ” It has the mystery and the majesty that one often discerns in the writings of the late Mary Oliver. ” See the poem below . . .

And I LOVE this line: “This is worldly wisdom handed down in an imaginative and poetic way.” To read the whole review in the August Issue of Cervena Barva go here: http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/newsletter.htm#BOOKREVIEW0

Thank you, Neil! Thank you Cervena Barva. And thank you to my publisher, Kelsay Books.

Enjoy!

Shutta

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Poem by Shutta Crum: He Tells Me He Loves Another

Here’s a poem of mine published by Mich. State University for their Short E’ditions machine/database. These are works that can be found on a database and printed off where Short E’dition machines are found, anywhere around the world. Pretty cool! (About the size of a wide receipt. See pic below.) If you come across MSU’s machine at the library on campus, give it a try.

Below is the full poem:

He Tells Me He Loves Another

The waters of the creek are tannin suffused.

I can’t see the bottom—and on the shore

there’s a hole opening, my feet are sliding in.

Leaves twist in the sluggish current,

not knowing which way to go.

When I turn to you, I see you have already gone

into that lone cerebral country

where landscape is logical and merciless.

You will trample over the precisely laid-out fields

of your mind until you’ve found a few weedy words

to yank out—roots and all, to offer me.

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Review of THE WAY TO THE RIVER by Shutta Crum

Love this recent review of THE WAY TO THE RIVER. Reviewed by Neil Leadbeater for Quill & Parchment online poetry zine. Also, here’s a link to an interview I did for them to go along with the review. It speaks to my years as a librarian, my invitation to the White House and my trip as a traveling author to Japan. Enjoy!

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The Way to the River
by Shutta Crum
31 poems, 68 pages
Price: $16.50
ISBN: 978-1-639800889
Publisher: Kelsay Books
To order: www.kelsaybooks.com

Reviewed by Neil Leadbeater

Born in Paintsville, Kentucky, Shutta Crum is an award-winning author and poet, educator, story-teller, public speaker and retired librarian. Her first poetry chapbook, When You Get Here, was published by Kelsay Books in 2020. The Way to the River is her second collection. She resides with her husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan and her website is www.shutta.com

The book cover is a story in itself and it is very much in tune with the territory inside. Judging by the name of the State on the map being held up against the steering wheel, we are on a journey, either heading for, or possibly lost in, the Pacific Northwest. Maybe the vehicle has broken down and it is time to summon help or maybe it is just a moment to open the door, cool down, and enjoy a short break in the journey. Part of its intrigue is the number of different interpretations that it opens up in the reader’s imagination.

The mini-stories behind Crum’s poems are also on a journey, a journey that requires some map reading for it is a journey through life and a journey through faith. In addition to Oregon, the terrain covered includes places such as Maggie Valley in North Carolina, Grayling in Michigan, Micanopy in Florida and Moab in Utah. We are guided throughout by maps, highways and rivers as Crum skilfully makes use of these metaphors to move her poems forward in a structured and disciplined way.

In the opening section, ‘Why Poetry?’, Crum sets out her poetic creed. She sees her poems in terms of fleeting images, gestures of recognition, paying attention to how her poems sit together and form a cohesive whole even as they are also meant to be read as entities in their own right. Those fleeting images offering gestures of recognition work well in ‘How Poetry Reframes the Moment’ where one thing sparks off the memory of another. In it, she asks us to:

..reframe the way water
undermines the banks of the creek bed.
Now, it’s the arthritis eating at the dust-colored dog –
known only as Boy –
who always cranked himself up to greet you at the gate.

There are some strong images in this poem: the misfiring of a tractor, the sound of a log-splitter echoing from a next-door farm and a persistence of fireflies circling near the creek.

The next section, ‘Of maps and Their Roads’, puts us into the driving seat as we pour over all those maps of interesting places: the Three Graces, otherwise known as Crab Rocks,  a beautiful dive site just off US101 ‘the kind of road / that furthered dreams’ west of Garibaldi, Oregon; Mystic Seaport in Connecticut which contains the largest maritime museum in the United States; Joshua Tree National Park in California. There is no knowing where a road may take you in this collection since all are worthy of exploration. As Crum says in her poem ‘How to Properly Read a Paper Map’, ‘Watch for a road / that reaches out to touch your foot. / Maybe just a thin thread – an idea of a road.’ I know when I was a child, farm tracks and country roads, especially ones that threatened at any moment to peter out into nothingness, held a certain fascination for me. In ‘Farnsworth Road’ Crum revisits her own childhood street noting how it feels both familiar and foreign to her now. In ‘Coming into Maggie Valley’ we get a real sense of the awe and majesty of the Great Smoky Mountains even if their summits are ‘arrayed / in turbans of fog’.

The poems in ‘Someone to Ride Shotgun’ invite us to connect with strangers. Two of the finest poems in the collection, ‘We Meet for Coffee at a Crowded Café’ and ‘Reading Brodsky (in English) While Stirring Soup’ appear in this section, the former earning Crum a Pushcart Prize nomination by Typehouse Literary in 2020.

River water flows through many of the poems in the next two sections: ‘Wading Out’ and ‘Water in the Lungs’. In ‘At the River’ Crum not only pulls up a discarded bicycle tire but also a memory. In other poems she writes of a river in spate, a journey of faith that begins with a baptism witnessed by the family in a creek and an account of the eroding force of water on rock in which Crum observes that ‘It takes millennia. Yet, / intention never wavers.’ In the second of these two sections about rivers, ‘Water in the Lungs’ Crum shifts her focus on to the darker side of things, writing in one poem about the murder victim, known as ‘Lavender Doe’ before her true identity was discovered, whose body had been set on fire in a pile of burning brush minutes before it was discovered in Kilgore, Texas in 2006. It is a powerful poem that sets out the facts of the case with the minimum of poetical embellishment.

The penultimate section, ‘Where the Dark Wild Closes In’ speaks of personal loss and includes the poem ‘Things Done Wrong’, a moving elegy addressed to Crum’s mother. It opens with a beautiful image:

Forgive me –
when you left, I forgot
to harvest the poems
that had taken root
in the floodplain of your hands.

and ends in remorse – a word that is defined in the next poem ‘All That is Left’ so succinctly:

remorse is a small sad word
uncapitalized.

The final section, ‘Everything is Far’ closes on an upbeat, optimistic and slightly humorous note where Crum, in her poem ‘No Mansions for Me’, envisages her arrival in Heaven. Perhaps it is here that the journey of faith ends…or maybe it is just about to begin.

This is an assured collection by a writer who is confident in her craft and I recommend it to all our readers.

http://quillandparchment.com/archives/June2023/book2.html

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They’re Almost Here: Grandma Heaven and Grandpa Heaven by Shutta Crum

Only a couple of more days! Can’t wait. Do join me and the illustrator Ruth McNally Barshaw at the book launch on Thursday July 13th at 6:30pm (EDT), in Ann Arbor, MI at Schuler Books in the Westgate Shopping Center. We’d love to see you there!

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BookSmitten Podcast: Patrick & Shutta in a Live Critique Session

Curoius about what an in-depth picture book critique is like? In this episode of the BookSmitten Podcast, Shutta Crum will critique Patrick Flores-Scott’s picture book manuscript: Bruno Want it All. Unrehearsed, and full of laughs. Enjoy here!

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My Favorite Father’s Day Post: God and the Swearing Book

Click here to read “God and the Swearing Book” about my two favorite reference questions and my two favorite fathers–both of whom brought their young ones into the Ann Arbor District Library while I was working there. It’s an older article that appeared in the Summer/fall issue of Children & Libraires in 2009. But still a sweet take on fathers meeting the needs of their kids. And, perhaps, even more approprite in today’s climate of so much book banning.

Enjoy!

And I hope you have a wonderful June (and Father’s Day).

Shutta

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