Penumbra—Michael Shewmaker’s debut collection—explores the half-shadows of a world torn between faith and doubt.

Penumbra—Michael Shewmaker’s debut collection—explores the half-shadows of a world torn between faith and doubt. From intricate descriptions of the rooms in a dollhouse, to the stark depiction of a chapel made of bones, from pre-elegies for a ghostly father, to his compelling treatment of his obsessed, human characters (a pastor, a tattoo artist, a sleepwalker, to name only a few), these are poems that wrestle with what it means to believe in something beyond one’s own mortality. Learned and formally adept, these poems consist of equal parts praise and despair. They announce Shewmaker as an important new voice in American poetry.

"“With his debut collection, Michael Shewmaker joins the ranks of poets such as Erica Dawson, Richie Hofmann, Melissa Range, and Caki Wilkinson who are writing rigorous formal poems that speak in twenty-first-century voices. …Shewmaker’s best poems… balance on the thin, slippery bar of form, perched between spiritual concerns and engagement with the world of the five senses, between, as he writes, ‘the martyrs and the marbled ground.’”" - Pleiades