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Consolation Prize
Tyler Robert Sheldon's newest chapbook Consolation Prize is a study in trauma and grief, as well as the work we do to surmount both. Poems here reflect the author's personal experiences with surgery and trauma, and abstractly reframe surgeries witnessed by Sheldon's friend Taryn Moller Nicoll (Program Coordinator of the Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery, former Artist in Residence for the LSU Neuroscience Center). Through discussions of mortality and how these issues shape our lives, Consolation Prize asks just what it is to be human and temporary.
"The poems in Tyler Robert Sheldon's Consolation Prize render the traumas of premature infant death and car wrecks into a beautiful music of grief and relatedness. The verses brim with imagination and wit, and, like the benevolent shark that appears in one of the poems, they show us a way through an unfixable human condition."
~Donald Levering, winner of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Poetry Prize and author of Coltrane's God
"Tyler Sheldon’s Consolation Prize shifts the prism of language to a modality of lyric vignettes. He tells tales of mortality, like that of his twin who died at birth. He celebrates beauty of rain and survival. About scars he writes, “some stretch to fit / the holes we make / in our hearts.” This poet pulls readers into a richly textured alternative reality that refracts wisdom."
~Denise Low, winner of the Red Mountain Press Editor's Choice Prize and author of Shadow Light
"The poems in Tyler Robert Sheldon's Consolation Prize render the traumas of premature infant death and car wrecks into a beautiful music of grief and relatedness. The verses brim with imagination and wit, and, like the benevolent shark that appears in one of the poems, they show us a way through an unfixable human condition."
~Donald Levering, winner of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Poetry Prize and author of Coltrane's God
"Tyler Sheldon’s Consolation Prize shifts the prism of language to a modality of lyric vignettes. He tells tales of mortality, like that of his twin who died at birth. He celebrates beauty of rain and survival. About scars he writes, “some stretch to fit / the holes we make / in our hearts.” This poet pulls readers into a richly textured alternative reality that refracts wisdom."
~Denise Low, winner of the Red Mountain Press Editor's Choice Prize and author of Shadow Light
14 pages, Paperback
First published August 3, 2018
3 people want to read
About the author
Tyler Robert Sheldon
7 books6 followersDr. Tyler Robert Sheldon is the author of seven poetry collections including Everything is Ghosts (Finishing Line Press, 2024) and When to Ask for Rain (Spartan Press, 2021), a Birdy Poetry Prize finalist. He is Editor-in-Chief of MockingHeart Review, and his poetry, fiction, artwork, and criticism have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, The Tulane Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other venues. A Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient the Charles E. Walton Essay Award, he earned his PhD at LSU and his MFA at McNeese State University.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 5, 2018
I have a somewhat irrational fear of car accidents. Whenever there’s a car scene in a movie or on television, I flinch even if nothing happens. I’ve never been in a serious car crash, but when I was young my brother crashed his motorcycle. He was racing a train in the early hours of the night, and somehow I knew that something was wrong because I awoke from a dead sleep and found my entire family gone, my parents having left to go to the hospital. The details of that night are burned into my memory, even though my brother survived.
Reading Consolation Prize by Tyler Sheldon was a bit like that, waking from a dream in an empty house and not being able to remember what happened exactly, but knowing that something terrible was there in your consciousness and that thing reached out and touched you. Trauma leaves its traces, “The invisible hands that lace tight our nerves” (“Post-Trauma”).
These poems explore the dark part of the self that is inextricably linked to loss. From the beginning with the subtle and somewhat nostalgic “Consolation Prize,” which processes the cancer of a grandmother through the lens of the enduring love of a grandchild and the love of her partner, to the somewhat speculative “With Full Intent of Distraction,” the collection begins in a place that feels familiar.
And aren’t these all natural and yet unnatural human experiences? Haven’t we all known the dark space between existence, whether in illness when our bodies, meant to house an everlasting and unbreakable soul, fail us? Or else when in sleep and we drift into that sacred realm of the in-between, where our minds are capable of both nightmare and dream, both truth and untruth? And the real question is, “How does one deal with that sort / of heavy knowing . . .?” (“In Which You Wake Up”)
Perhaps the most powerful thread among these poems for me, personally, was how Sheldon writes about the experience of losing a twin brother at birth with an exacting gentleness, “You, whose spinal fluid broke all rules / and made its own cranial walls” (“Brother”) Aren’t all siblings something we have the potential to lose? This book prays at the altar of human fears, feeding them, letting us linger in their shadowy presence, as expressed in the metaphor of a haunting shark in “Discovering a Lost Twin.”
Consolation Prize is a powerful book in a compact package from a writer who I hope will continue to explore these themes. It feels in places like Sheldon is dipping into the river Styx, only to pull us back out again. Perhaps I want the comfort of knowing that grief changes in some way or perhaps I am just hesitant to admit that “. . . memories / don’t fade with age, / and some stretch to fit / the holes we make / in our hearts” (“Scar”).
This review originally published at Entropy Mag: https://entropymag.org/review-consola...
Reading Consolation Prize by Tyler Sheldon was a bit like that, waking from a dream in an empty house and not being able to remember what happened exactly, but knowing that something terrible was there in your consciousness and that thing reached out and touched you. Trauma leaves its traces, “The invisible hands that lace tight our nerves” (“Post-Trauma”).
These poems explore the dark part of the self that is inextricably linked to loss. From the beginning with the subtle and somewhat nostalgic “Consolation Prize,” which processes the cancer of a grandmother through the lens of the enduring love of a grandchild and the love of her partner, to the somewhat speculative “With Full Intent of Distraction,” the collection begins in a place that feels familiar.
And aren’t these all natural and yet unnatural human experiences? Haven’t we all known the dark space between existence, whether in illness when our bodies, meant to house an everlasting and unbreakable soul, fail us? Or else when in sleep and we drift into that sacred realm of the in-between, where our minds are capable of both nightmare and dream, both truth and untruth? And the real question is, “How does one deal with that sort / of heavy knowing . . .?” (“In Which You Wake Up”)
Perhaps the most powerful thread among these poems for me, personally, was how Sheldon writes about the experience of losing a twin brother at birth with an exacting gentleness, “You, whose spinal fluid broke all rules / and made its own cranial walls” (“Brother”) Aren’t all siblings something we have the potential to lose? This book prays at the altar of human fears, feeding them, letting us linger in their shadowy presence, as expressed in the metaphor of a haunting shark in “Discovering a Lost Twin.”
Consolation Prize is a powerful book in a compact package from a writer who I hope will continue to explore these themes. It feels in places like Sheldon is dipping into the river Styx, only to pull us back out again. Perhaps I want the comfort of knowing that grief changes in some way or perhaps I am just hesitant to admit that “. . . memories / don’t fade with age, / and some stretch to fit / the holes we make / in our hearts” (“Scar”).
This review originally published at Entropy Mag: https://entropymag.org/review-consola...
Displaying 1 of 1 review