A Habit of Landscape

Shelley Armitage's poems hold and withhold, gathering artifacts and tracing the demarcations of landscape and life-barbed wire, schist, igneous escarpments, a cellar's dirt walls-while also acknowledging what cannot be contained, nor ever secured by words. To do the work of "ancestral ecology," she roots and uproots, considering what might be salvaged by "looking/in a world wound down."-Christopher Bakken
Shelley Armitage is a poet aware of mythmaking-of the way we all fill the inexplicable with figures of the imagination. In her poems, she makes a world of presence, of the actual, of the body. She lives inside and celebrates the earthly condition of humanness, of being a thinking animal. A Habit of Landscape is a wonderous collection that reminds us of states of being so fundamental they can only be described as holy.-Juliet Patterson, Threnody
Crisply vivid, witty, and at once far-seeing and a-whisper with intimacies, Armitage's poems are a rare and splendid pleasure. Above all, she reminds us to use the heart to see, to hear, to sing, even unto antelopes, baby foxes, rocks. Hers is a Texas that shimmers and leaves an afterglow.-C.M. Mayo, author of Meteor