Bøger af Red Shuttleworth

American poetry of the Washington State steppe and scrublands.Red Shuttleworth's Straight Ahead shows readers a crisply-drawn textual landscape of the scablands of Eastern Washington. This is a wounded land pocked with volcanic rock, coyotes, and "plow-ripped / floury soil" that, like the mythic Old West, "declines and crumbles / to blue rock suburban driveway gravel" and "double-wide farmhouses." In these stark and masterfully-wrought scenes-most crafted in chiseled tanka-like five-line poems-we get a glimpse into this microcosm of America through Shuttleworth's astute, terse, and always human observations. In Straight Ahead we hear the twenty-first century lament of the exile in the Western wilderness.- Barbara Brinson Curiel, author, Mexican Jenny and Other Poems, winner of the 2012 Philip Levine Prize

"Ghosts & Birthdays is Red Shuttleworth's invocation and - 'levitation with the dead' - a poet's cultural measure of the human menagerie: heroes, villains, antiheroes, writers, painters, boxers, poets, politicos, cowboy robbers, killers - an incredible range of characters in the large world Red Shuttleworth breathes alive. His poetry is always true to reveal human folly - the absurdities that contain a kind of beauty only when articulated by a true poet with a head and a heart. I'm knocked to the mat with what he discovers - his elegiac voice bringing us the ghosts of those about to be lost in the shadows of the digital disintegrating world: Olson, Dorn, Elvis, Ernest, Gabby, Will, Hank, Lyndon, Sonny, Hunter, and don't leave out Gertrude Stein eating popcorn waving fatty arms, at the movies spilling popcorn, laughing.... And on and on... I've always wanted to cross the poetry borders with William Carlos Williams' quote for the Canadian poet, Irving Layton when W.C.W. said of Layton, When I clapped eyes on his poems... I let out a yell of joy! Likewise for me here - and Red Shuttleworth's happy birthday to the whole damn thing!" -- Barry McKinnon, author of In the Millennium and The The (Finalist, 1981, Governor General's Award for Poetry)

WINNER OF A 2016 WRANGLER AWARD 2016 from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

"Johnny Ringo," an epic biographic poem about the Old West gunfighter, by two-time Spur Award-winning poet Red Shuttleworth, sheds brilliant light on bloody historical events, from Ringo's exclusion from the James-Younger gang to mindless violence in Texas, from accidental fame brought on by dime novels to his spiral into ambition-fueled alcoholism and to employment of his great gift for self-destruction. Shuttleworth's Johnny Ringo paints a vivid, pinpoint-present portrait of a man who was charismatic and larger-than-life, a murderous psychotic to be feared, a spiritually ill man more than a few women wanted to save, a legend who wished to be a god.

Poetry of the American West by award-winning poet Red Shuttleworth.

Praise for Tumbledown"Red Shuttleworth's Tumbledown takes us to an isolated Nevada desert and inserts us into the lives of a quirky cast of misfits, spirits, and a talking coyote. Through each scene these characters are faced with choices and challenges and their own versions of Heaven and Hell with a little Wild West always lurking in the background."-- Anita La Cava Swift"In Shuttleworth's plays, myth and the reality of the West meet head-on, like a couple of adversaries heading for a final showdown. Tumbledown offers a West full of the possibility of redemption, even if some of the characters don't take advantage of that offer. Tumbledown's characters are ready to charm, steal, and kill their way through life, all the while aware that the environment around them -The West-- plays a role in their choices."-- Robert Nott"Red Shuttleworth's Tumbledown is powerful and disturbing. Shuttleworth creates plays with a rare panache for uncovering troubling truths with a vivid sense of character, violence, and theatricality."-- Vincent Murphy"Love Red Shuttleworth's Tumbledown. Welcome to the Wild West where everyone is broken and hope is as elusive as a rattler's love. Shuttleworth, in poem after poem and play after play, illuminates the brutal and haunted immediacy of the contemporary West. A wasteland of bleak, vibrant, desperate, and forgotten survivors. And it's f**king funny as hell. Tumbledown knocked me out."-- Ethan Phillips

"The poems within Eclipse of the Sun offer homage to boxing at its grittiest levels and to fighters who persevere, with hope, blood, and bone, against sense and loss. Few professional boxers earn a living. Few world champion boxers arrive in their forties with any money left from their sport. In Eclipse of the Sun, boxers arrive at poverty rather than riches, at post-career menial jobs or worse, with no pension plan to fall back on. Perhaps the luckiest are "journeymen," "opponents" who take on upcoming fighters-with little hope of winning. These poems pay tribute to the improbable dreams of valiant men in a rough sport"--

Red Shuttleworth eats tumbleweeds for breakfast. He would rope a few calves before noon if it weren't for a bum shoulder. The West settles down in him like a dog in the grass: the sound of his dialogue, the cadences of his characters, the smartness of their responses to one another. But it's deeper than that. In Rumors and Borders, there's a savage wind off the desert, the hiss of snakes in the rocks, and the faraway whine of a coyote at night. Shuttleworth's plays are surprising and unpredictable, poetic and tough. Most of all, his plays are informed by the land that shapes him, the land that shapes the characters who speak through him.