These poems cast light on figures at history's margins whose perspectives are often overlooked or ignored.
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About the Author
Shelley Puhak lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Stalin in Aruba is her first book. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New Delta Review, New South, Third Coast, and other journals. Author City of Residence: Baltimore, Maryland
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Shelley Puhak lives in Baltimore, Maryland. STALIN IN ARUBA, her first poetry collection, was awarded the 2010 Towson Prize for Literature. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Missouri Review, New South, Third Coast, and many other journals. She is also the author of the chapbook THE CONSOLATION OF FAIRY TALES.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By cliff lynn
Format:Paperback
Had my high school history class been this interesting, I might have actually hung around long enough to graduate. Complete with 20th-century dictators, nipples, graveyard visits and laudanum, Shelley Puhak's beautiful and lyrical take on 20th century world events and leaders is simultaneously a sweeping epic, yet poignantly personal. There are even places where we can sing along. Intelligent, tragic, and hilarious, I can't recommend this work strongly enough.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A powerful collection, the poet's use of language is precise, the content is lush, the result is at once historical and heartfelt--with lines like "constellations spilling across bare/shoulders while the trees pulsed green" Shelley Puhak grabs hold of readers and makes us witness to her full-bodied resurrection of characters from photographs, gravestones, and old letters.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By B. Johnson
Format:Paperback
It's a rare writer who can talk about Stalin and suburbia with equal facility, but that's what Shelley Puhak has done. In her book of poems, STALIN IN ARUBA, there's a satisfying element of voyeurism, of being let in on intimate moments in others' lives. The book concerns itself silmultaneously with the ordinary: "Who can stop thinking of the small things? Dishes against sink, small white feet against chilled linoleum?" (Wars) and the extraordinary, as in her listing of self-immolations, "Monk Quang Duc, the unflinching lotus on the busy streets of Saigon." (Torch) We peek in on the ordinary moments of extraordinary people-Pope Leo X, Lenin, and, of course, the titular character, Stalin. Puhak excavates, lovingly, carefully. From the earth under a suburb where, " ...nothing is allowed to die..." (The Science of the Suburbs) to the deep recesses of the heart where the real truths lie, as in "Nadya to Stalin, 1925," the imagined response of Lenin's widow to Stalin's factual threats of blackmail. But the greatest miracle of this little book is how Puhak digs into and then condenses a broad spectrum of history and humanity and reveals the why of human history repeating itself. "It makes sense that we can live with a thing like war," she writes, "when we have been living with our families so long." (War) Throughout, Puhak's writing is smart and accessible, and these are the kinds of poems that can be read again and again, each time yielding some new understanding.
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