“It’s All Here Somewhere” by Christy Shepard explores the mysteries, heartaches, and, ultimately the joys and triumphs of a woman’s life from adolescence to old age, from infertility to adoption, from life to death. Shepard’s precise language will pierce your heart, even as you marvel at her skill at poetic form and compression. I will be turning to Shepard’s poems again and again. They are that good and that unforgettable. “It’s All Here Somewhere,” indeed.​

----- Angie Minkin, author of “Balm for the Living and Lineage Songs” (forthcoming)

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Christy Shepard paints with words. “Two sets of long underwear hang on the line / by a broken shack with blue shutters / a single sign of Siberian life.” Who wouldn’t read poetry like this? Shepard evokes the natural world while plumbing the depths of her interior life. I was riveted from start to finish by her book’s intensity, tenderness, and imagery.

----- Martina Reaves, author of “I’m Still Here”

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In this luminous collection, Christy Shepard confides in us readers—as in, she entrusts to our safekeeping, our care and protection, tender yet incandescent poems of “a child insomniac who welcomed morning,” a mother who holds close a keening daughter all afternoon, a neighbor unscrewing a jar of olives despite his tremor. These exquisite poems span regions and seasons—Minnesota winter light outside a hospital, summer heat on a Mendocino dock, rainfall in Siberia, the Northern Lights over Vermont—and each one meditates eloquently on our complicated humanity, on “the nature of donation/who gives, who receives.” Savor again and again the gift of Christy Shepard’s wise and steady poems, quietly bracing revelations, all of them “small promises against the dark night.”

----- Kathleen McClung, author of “Climbing the Fire Escape, Flipping the Raft: Poems on Women in Movies”  and “Questions of Buoyancy”