Words for Coffee (Spartan Press, 2025)​
​
​
Coming October 2025!
​
Words for Coffee, Sheldon's eighth collection of poems, explores the life of of Kansas City therapist and social worker Beverly Sheldon, the author's grandmother, as well as his time with her during his childhood, and finally her slow slippage into dementia, as she—a former psychologist with all the pride of that occupation’s learning—began forgetting names and places, routines and the subconscious drivers that underpin everyday action and coordination. These poems also serve as an examination of how the mind can change over time—slowly vaulting the gulf from incisive locus of an in-control self to something unrecognizable even to that very same self.
​​ ~~~​
​
Advance Praise:
"Words for Coffee is more than just an exploration of grief, but a lighthouse for anyone who has lost a loved one. Tyler Robert Sheldon is a brilliant describer of moments of care, connection, and loss. This poetry collection offers safe harbor."
​
​
“In the measured, understated lines of Words for Coffee, Tyler Robert Sheldon conjures the intimate, quiet, secure space of his grandmother’s home. The speaker’s beloved grandmother is cozy and known, but not simple: a radical therapist with a clear-headed bravery, she shares Rothkos and ancient oaks with the speaker, folding her strength into him. Later, as the poems delve into the heartache of memory loss and elder care, the speaker and his family ‘pile sandbags against the coming flood,’ imbued as they are with life from her gentle, empathetic presence. Words for Coffee channels the specific grief of a love that threatens perfection: the growing, collective awareness that it will someday end.”
—Dorsey Craft, author of A Brief History of Accidental Inventions and Plunder
​
“Pure-hearted, mournful, playful, serious—these poems run the gamut as both testament and elegy to a great woman gone.”
—Kevin Rabas, 2017-2019 Poet Laureate of Kansas and author of Improvise