Shane Book
WebsiteYears: 2000, 2002, 2004
Biography
Shane Book’s first collection, Ceiling of Sticks, won the 2009 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the 2012 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was a 2011 Poetry Society of America “New American Poet” Selection. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines in the U.S., U.K., and Canada—and on film. He has received scholarships to the MacDowell Colony, Brazil’s Sacatar Foundation, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program and Cave Canem. His honors include a New York Times Fellowship in Poetry, Fellowships to the Flaherty Film Seminar and the Telluride Film Festival, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a National Magazine Award.
Poem
Photograph of Religious sacrifice, Tarahumara, Mexico, 1984
Though blurred in the background, the first thing
you notice is the small white teeth, bared
in a smile, if that is the word, if goats can smile.
The boy in the foreground does not smile,
lips pressed hard together, nose slightly flared
as though he’s just exerted himself.
Pulled up by a rope, one of the goat’s hooves
hangs limp at the wrist, if that is the word,
if goats can have wrists. The goat skinned
from the neck down. The boy’s hair, a helmet
of freshly shorn black bristles. The goat’s neck
and the long bump of vein and switching sinew
of the neck and the neck stretched.
A shadow across the boy’s eyes, the first
hairs of a mustache and the tiny pock mark
scars on his boy cheeks. The goat’s long
bushy white beard. Something unseen pins
the head up high so the goat seems to teeter on
unseen hooves. Their eyes are open but not watching,
exactly, boy and goat poised, as if to say to some god
looming in the lens, Is this what you want.