Reviews of Among Women

“With remarkably soft language and spacious structure, Shinder achieves an astounding tenderness.” —American Book Review

“Shinder’s voice is rich and wild.” —Provincetown Arts

“I love these poems for their unbearable honesty. I love what these poems say and I love the form in which they say it. Jason Shinder is one of the finest of our new poets.” —Gerald Stern

“I don’t know of any male poet that approximates the honest terror and desire, the sense of shock that runs through these poems. The poems in Among Women are so fixed in a merciless surgical light and yet they’re so tender and alive with emotion. I hasten to add that I don’t see them as ‘gender politics’ poems either—their field of contemplation is far beyond all that. The poems in Among Women make that clear—that it is about nothingness, anhedonia, possession, lack of vulnerability, longing for vulnerability. It is offensive to say that these poems are brave and yet they are brave. And also lyrical and grieving. A Kaddish. Another offensive word or words: breakthrough poems. What allowed him to write them? A dreamlike freedom and a powerful line of inquiry. Anyway, bravo, bravissimo!” —Carol Muske-Dukes

“Here, in this astonishingly transparent collection, is a poet at his most permeable, most lucid, most luminous. If these poems are edgy, it’s not because they’re spooky or toxic or inconstant at any time. Instead, their danger and devotion come from the passionate disclosures here, the unveiling of a body of many revelations, each in the company of candor and of truth. Shinder writes: ‘I open up her heart/like a rose/and pull the bee out.’ Here is the heart and its opening and the rose and the bee and its sting.” —Lucie Brock-Broido