Advance Praise for Traumas
(Yellow Flag Press, 2017)
"Tyler Sheldon composes poems to place in the vacancy left in the world by the departure of his twin brother—poems that name what might have been, poems that identify silence as a speaking place, a place to discover the survivor’s vocation: remember, wonder, suffer, and tell."
Author of 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared
"Tender as a little wave, but tough-eyed as a large shark, Tyler Sheldon’s new chapbook grapples with love and loss. Tyler meditates on the premature death of his infant twin, broken-down college-years cars, and the blossoming love of an artistic couple. In this new work, memory and experience mix."
Poet Laureate of Kansas, 2017-2019
Author of Songs for My Father
"Tyler Sheldon was born to grief, surviving when his twin brother did not. The poems in Traumas explore the 'sin' of survival, the losses of twin, of friend, of innocence. Birds accuse, yolks break, yet this fine chapbook—embracing our faulty understanding of grief and loss—brilliantly moves us past scars and toward the wholes we make of our hearts."
O. Henry Award winner
Author of rode and Secrets of the Tsil Cafe