Boy with Flowers
Of camouflage, of appearance versus reality, of that darkness out of which we hope to draw forth a self we can recognize as our own---these are among the concerns of these beautifully eerie poems that over and over purport to navigate one space even as they carry us to spaces the poems themselves seem startled to have arrived at. On one hand, Boy with Flowers stands in the crosshairs of societally imposed notions of gender and the gender we instinctively know to be our own, inside; but for gender, we might substitute memory also, for these poems are everywhere concerned with the tension between what we remember and what can't possibly have occurred, between what occurred and what we resist remembering, the memories "darkening everywhere/ they'[ve] been touched." It is as if identity consisted only of the many selves we can still remember, and the self were "an endless chain/ of colored scarves/ unfolding from the magician's sleeve." Indeed the poems seem the work of a magician: stirring, strange, strangely made---which is to say, original. --Carl PhillipsThe poems in Boy with Flowers are gorgeous, taut, and often quietly, almost dreamily, menacing. Shipley's poems are fascinated by appearance and mirroring, understanding the ways in which how someone sees or is seen might change his self-identification; in this world, identity must necessarily be multifaceted and ever-mutating as a form of survival. With so much shapeshifting at play, it is no wonder these poems are filled with images of dreams, of bruises, of darkening twilight: places that themselves exist between states of safety and disaster. Shipley's wonderful poems illuminate the innate between-ness in which all of us exist. --Paisley RekdalIn Boy with Flowers, J. Ely Shipley maps the fragmented space of a transgendered self: disquieting dreams and tilted reflections, the difficulty of a world that ushers us into "girls rooms" and "boys rooms," the complicated realm of desire and its sometimes violent repercussions. Also, there are so many moments of tenderness: here is a poet whose work transcends the body with "a lightening bolt shot sharp through the heart." --D.A. 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And so, quietly, elegantly, and with exquisite remorselessness, Shipley has invented an entirely new poetic consciousness. There is, I'm certain, no end to the flowers and beasts it will find. --Donald Revell