The poems in Portable Planet depict Shaffer's travels around the Pacific Rim: in California, Japan, and Indonesia. From Okinawan hermit crab to America's E stamp to unexpected glories of baldness, lines shine with humor and compassion. The Western Room, the central poem, explores Okinawa with a walking tour of Shuri Castle, once the royal red heart of the Ryukyu Kingdom.
Eric Paul Shaffer lives on O'ahu overlooking the Kalihi Valley in Honolulu.
His books of poetry include Lāhaina Noon, Portable Planet, Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen, RattleSnake Rider, and kindling: Poems from Two Poets, and chapbooks include Restoring Lady Liberty, Road Sign Suite: Across American and Again, and Instant Mythology.
His fiction includes You Are Here and The Felony Stick, two chapbooks, both of which contain selections from his first novel Burn & Learn, or Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era, which was published in November 2009.
He has been a featured writer at the Talking Gourds Poetry Festival, Cedarville University, Maui Literary Circles Reading Festival, University of Wisconsin: Wausau, Kentucky Country Day School, Leeward Community College, and Yongsan Airbase in Korea.
Known as "Reckless," he is a charter member of the "Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers," an aggregation of writers including James Taylor III, John Kain, Kathryn Capels, Michael Adams, Padma Thornlyre, and the members of the publishing collective known as Turkey Buzzard Press, named in admiration and celebration of the work of Lew Welch.
In 2002, Shaffer won the Elliot Cades Award for Literature, an endowed literary prize awarded annually to an established local writer. In 2006, he received a fellowship to the Fishtrap Summer Writers Workshop and Retreat; won the Rupert Hughes Writing Award for his novel-in-progress Six Ways Home; and won an "Award of Excellence" in the Ka Palapala Po'okela Book Awards for Lāhaina Noon from the Hawai'i Book Publishers Association. "Officer, I Saw the Whole Thing," from Lāhaina Noon, received a "Special Mention" in the 2007 Pushcart Prize anthology. In 2009, for his poem "The Whistle," he won the 2009 James M. Vaughan Award for Poetry from Hawai'i Pacific University.
He is an avid fan of the blues, bad science fiction movies, horror novels, five-mile runs, Hawaiian language and culture, star-gazing, contemporary poetry, Hōkū and Nalu (the two wildest cats he's ever known), and, most of all, his wife Veronica.
