Louisiana Literature Press is proud to announce the publication of Vivian Shipley’s poetry collection, Slow Dancing with the Dark.
The book is currently available for purchase through our press store (Please remember to specify title and author when submitting payment via PayPal.). The book will also be listed on Amazon.com in the near future.
From Slow Dancing with the Dark
Ghost Apples
Like my sister’s robe in my closet keeping
shape of the body that wore it,
crystal shells of Granny Smith
dangle from branches. Icing on contact,
rain has cocooned these apples
leaving a frozen skin clinging to trees.
Turning to mush before the clear shells
defrost, pulp oozes through creating
globes that haunt the tree. When I shake
them loose, the glassy shrouds shatter,
no flesh left to bruise unlike my sister
whose brain tumor rotted the stem
holding her body to this world.
Cremated, I buried her ashes
in the ground. Still unable to cry,
unshed tears may freeze, dissolving
grief inside me that can rot then slip
away and melt into this earth.
About Our Author
Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Vivian Shipley’s 13th book, Hindsight: 2020 (Louisiana Literature Press, SLU, 2022), was awarded the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize for Literary Achievement. She won a 2023 Samuel Washington Allen Poetry Prize from NEPC and was awarded a 2020-21 CT Office of the Arts Poetry Fellowship, won the 2020-21 Poet Hunt from The MacGuffin and was Rattle’s October 2020 Ekphrastic Challenge. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, her 12th book, An Archaeology of Days (Negative Capability Press, 2019) was named the 2020 Housatonic Book Prize for Poetry Finalist. The Poet (Louisiana Literature Press, SLU) and Perennial (Negative Capability Press) were published in 2015. All of Your Messages Have Been Erased, (Louisiana Literature Press, SLU, 2010) won the 2011 NEPC’s Sheila Motton Award, the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, and CT Press Club’s Prize for Best Creative Writing. Her sixth chapbook is Greatest Hits: 1974-2010 (Pudding House Press, Youngstown, Ohio, 2010). She has received the LOC’s CT Lifetime Achievement Award for Service to the Literary Community and a CT Book Award for Poetry two times. Other poetry awards for individual poems include Steve Kowit Prize for Poetry from San Diego Arts & Entertainment Guild, Hackney Literary Award, PSA’s Lucille Medwick Prize, Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Prize, USC’s Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, William Faulkner Society’s Marble Faun Poetry Prize, NEPC’s Daniel Varoujan Prize and the Hart Crane Prize from Kent State. Raised in Kentucky, a member of the University of Kentucky Hall of Distinguished Alumni, the highest award the university can bestow on an alumnus, she has a PhD from Vanderbilt University and lives at Morgan Point and North Haven, Connecticut with her husband, Ed Harris.
For further information, visit her website: Vivianshipley.net