The Selected Reginald Shepherd

Edited by Jericho Brown, this is a rich introduction to Shepherd’s work, which is elegant, erudite and wry, every poem an argument for language as a way of life.

* The New York Times *

As one opens The Selected Shepherd, it is possible to feel his time has come. There is no one with Shepherd’s nervy combination of the refractory, sassy, and plangent, the witty, sorrowing, and unappeased, no one so torn up and twisted in the face of what he loves.

* New York Review of Books *

Reginald Shepherd is also a cloud-spotter.

* The New York Times *

One of the most potent joys of The Selected Shepherd, and of Brown's editorial acumen, is the resulting immersion in a compressed, intense iteration of Reginald's built world.

* Poetry Foundation *

An excellent introduction to this important poet.

* Green Linden Press *

The Selected Shepherd is a very welcome arrival that may encourage readers to rediscover an award-winning, fiercely intelligent poet, anthologist, and critic. Gone much too soon at the age of 45, Reginald Shepherd showed in his increasingly stronger collections that he was well on his way to becoming a major force in American poetry.

* The Gay & Lesbian Review *

In an age when poets often vanish from larger cultural memory shortly after their last breath, this selected compendium, published fifteen year safter Shepherd’s passing, is a true feat of treasure and salvage, ensuring that one of the most vibrant and charged voices of our young twenty-first century stays alive.

-- Ocean Vuong, author of Time is a Mother and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

The extraordinary Reginald Shepherd remains both a tidal force and an enigmatic planet in contemporary poetry and in legendary Pitt Poetry Series editor Ed Ochester’s vast constellation of stars. The brilliant Jericho Brown has distilled Shepherd’s magnificence—a style born of the Bronx, rural Georgia, Iowa City, Eliot’s Waste Land, and Orpheus’s underworld—to a dynamic, essential volume. The Pitt Poetry Series is proud to present this landmark compilation.

-- Terrance Hayes, author of So to Speak and coeditor, Pitt Poetry Series

The discovery of Reginald Shepherd’s poetry—in an envelope, with a letter and a stamped self-addressed return—was among the highest points of my five years as editor of the Kenyon Review. Of course his poems were published, and a correspondence, a friendship ensued. His premature death was devastating. Rereading these poems, I follow the arc of their music, wit, erudition, narrative, tragedy: the chronicle of an exemplary (Black, gay, American, polymath out of the projects) life, but first of all, I admire, am in a bit of awe of, and thoroughly enjoy them.

-- Marilyn Hacker, author of Calligrap