Haunting, beautiful, mysterious, magnificent, terrible, and so moving. This poet-shaman's theme of myth and memory and violence and abuse and what's real and what isn't, is powerfully informative, is restorative. "Turning, you ask me to come/into your dream as a witness." This is what Karolyn Redoute's Prayers of the Shaman asks of us and the reward for doing so is the solace that all great poetry gives. I remember a number of these poems years after I first read them. "read my glass heart/unbury me."
Sharon Doubiago
Author of My Father's Love and Love on the Streets
In Prayers of the Shaman, Karolyn Redoute forges her spell, and takes the reader deep into a world where myth and reality are united. Her imagination breaks down the invisible boundaries between the mundane and the extraordinary, and we see, through her sharp and compassionate eyes, how the world might be if it were made by poets and dreamers. There is a delicate balance here - love hinged with pain, sanity weighed against madness, magic mingling with the emptiness of the prairie. What Redoute gives us, finally, is a world where we might live, flaws and flourishes aside, just simply live, and uncover the beauty that surrounds us.
William Reichard
Author of Sin Eater
"that is how the shaman sings / fragments first and then belief" Karolyn Redoute's poems are melancholy, born of woman, earth and sky. They look back, and forward with longing. A humble spirit, forming prayers. Redoute's words: cold, snow, grief, bone, blue, blackbird, hawk, raven, rock, desert, plains, fire, and wind, myth, and dream. Words that deliver us to other worlds.
Sherry Quan Lee
Author, Chinese Blackbird and How to Write a Suicide Note:
serial essays that saved a woman's life
