What do you think?
Rate this book
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
28 pages, Paperback
Published August 24, 2018
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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
No one has reviewed this book yet.