Red Lemons
poems
Sean Shearer
9781629221953
65 pages
University of Akron Press
Overview
Red Lemons is a moving debut collection about drug addiction and loss told through both a narrative and surreal lens, swaying from logic to absurdity, grimness to beauty. In these poems there is a “war with self” tethered to both the narrative and lyric, often playing with scope and leaps that fall between the threshold of order and chaos—a style of gentle reserve and wild transparency—Red Lemons is poised with brutal imagination, where nightmares “wait beyond the night / in a pitch we cannot hear, / like a still pond and all its eaten.”
Author Bio
Sean Shearer grew up in New Jersey. His first collection of poems, Red Lemons (U of Akron, 2021), won the 2019 Akron Poetry Prize, selected by Victoria Chang. He is the recipient of a 2020 Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and his poems have appeared in New England Review, Boulevard, Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, jubilat, and elsewhere. He received his MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he is currently a City Mail Carrier for USPS. Sean is the founder of BOAAT Press.
