Wild Girls

"Sometimes all that glitters is real. You'll find this is true when you read Wild Girls-a book that is golden. Brewer's sartorial poems dazzle with language personalizing poems with humor and pathos. The seduction and glamour of clothing often carries the poet's themes-funny and sad, sweet and soulful-but the extraordinary realization is that sensuality can define our humanity. Each poem wears an unruined heart, the brightest apparel of all." -Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate

"Color matters," as do scents and textures, sights and sounds: Shirley Brewer's Wild Girls is alive to the senses to an extraordinary degree. What's not to love in a collection that so effectively deploys fashion as objective correlative for the ups and downs, the love, loss, and adventures richly lived by vivid women. Like the "feisty babes" who populate this book, Brewer's wise and witty poems "conjure magic spells [and] spark an abundance of pluck." - Moira Egan, Amore e Morte

"The poems in Wild Girls "shoot the ashes off the end of a cigarette." Poet Shirley J. Brewer deftly pins both the well-known and unsung heroines to the skies of her imagination. From Annie Oakley to Queen Elizabeth II to Jackie Kennedy to Breonna Taylor, she captivates the senses with a fragrant and richly-hued assemblage rife with pain, joy, humor and grace. Brewer conjures a thrilling magic in this important collection, triumphantly evoking flashes of both Plath and Duhamel." - Dean Bartoli Smith, Baltimore Sons