Secure Your Own Mask

“From the opening poem of Secure Your Own Mask, whose speaker confuses ‘ringing/ and wringing,’ I was hooked. This book does both: it rings and wrings. In searing lyrics, Shaindel Beers explores beauty and violence, and the voyeuristic impulse toward and unhealthy human appetite for both. ‘The world as it was before/ no longer exists,’ but the poems do exist, and they are not only unflinching but also open, even warm, despite it all. Secure Your Own Mask is a remarkable collection. These poems are quite literally death-defying.”—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

“With the cries of bird wives, farm wives, beaten wives, and in almost wrecked lives, the wonderful poems of Shaindel Beers shimmer and sing. “How much of love / is love?” these scintillating works of art ask, their inquiries the kinds of questions the survivor of a wrong marriage doesn’t want to ask, and must—because urgency is the meter of this heart, because the thrumming of poetry has the power to heal.”—Alan Michael Parker

“Consider this book’s imperative title as you enter the world of Shaindel Beers. How many times have you heard that phrase within the flight attendant’s spiel but never thought to yourself, There’s a poem there? For Beers, however, experience and the language with which we negotiate it are fraught, suggestive, ironic, and yet clear as the air above the clouds. The world we share with her hands her raw material—a child, pelicans, lovers, a drunken cowboy, an old house, and yes, particular words—and she proceeds to build these exquisite living machines of language we call poems. They unmask what it means to be really alive. Read, and listen, and be dazzled.”
—Robert Wrigley