Building a City for Jamie

In Building a City for Jamie, Penelope Shuttle's sixth collection of poetry, we are reminded that poets feel as they speak; they feel out the world with the multi-media instrument of speech. A poet is in truth a "mouth-painter," one who paints not only visually but with touch and smell, the two senses that tend to be neglected in our culture. In these new poems, the poet's feeling eye "touches and embraces and behaves like an investigating organ, fusing into other senses." Brilliant, funny, clever, and sometimes outrageous, Shuttle's poems lead in and out of a world in which the original senses are pristine, where the mouth that utters not only speaks love but kisses it into existence.

Marked by an element of disturbance, due both to the poet's approach into middle-age and by her daughter's coming of age, this new and exciting collection offers poetry lovers a magnificent look at the "spiritual and sensual realities" of us all.