Shake Until Cloudy

A collection of progressively lengthy poems that tenderly perpend life's attendant existential concerns

In her fourth collection, Shake Until Cloudy, Amanda Nadelberg (born 1982) approaches the everyday from a slant that reappraises reality and inspires wonder. The book begins with an assembly of Micropoems--conceptual miniatures with a sense of humor--which lead into lyric mediations on love, personhood and the desire to begin again. Filled with tenderness and temporality, these poems open into metaphysical questions and possibilities--"Faces appeared in fragments / I didn't remember how to go / going through the world / being who you are." With Shake Until Cloudy, Nadelberg shows us once more how forms can create the sway of life, rhythmic and emotional, and how our observations reveal the transformative nature of attention.