Shelter
Carey Salerno
Available January 2009
Disturbing because of the cruelty intended as kindness to animals and the speaker's unflinching, relentless insistence on her culpability, these poems force us to consider whether we can be redeemed by our capacity for love, compassion and personal responsibility. Heartrending, but absolutely necessary and enlightening, this lyric debut is beautiful in its courage and honesty.
"In a volume as compassionate as it is unsettling, Carey Salerno questions the moral authority assumed in the narrow confines of the animal shelter. Abu Ghraib haunts these lines as the shelter takes on harrowing, allusive dimensions, and as the narrator weighs her burden of complicity. Shelter is filled with fierce and desperate yowling, much of it our own."
—Michael Waters
about the author
Carey Salerno was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She received her Bachelor’s degree in English with a creative writing emphasis at Western Michigan University and her MFA in Poetry from New England College in 2006. Her poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and have appeared in such journals as Rattle and Natural Bridge. She currently works in publishing and lives in Boston, Massachusetts with her husband.
Author photo by Derek Young
