Time Under Tension - by Jimmie Shields (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Take a drive back out to the suburb of the mind in Jimmie Shields' Time Under Tension--a wry and reflective tapestry of memory, and an eerie portrait of the bizarre in the mundane. Its title hints not only toward the stubborn and numbing stresses of a life, but also toward the almost metaphysical strangeness of being pulled along time's conveyor belt. Of simply being alive at all. And it's through this tension that the poems soar toward sudden, striking moments of mental clarity. Or delusion. Into wonder or into darkness. Like many of the book's odd scenes and characters, it all depends on how you choose to look.

Review Quotes

When I selected Jimmie Shields' Time Under Tension as winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions First Chapbook prize, I was surprised to learn that the work not only represents Shields' first collection, but his first publication. I don't know where this young man has been hiding, but I know what he's been doing there--paying attention. In language and images that are accessible, yet often surreal and refreshingly rich, these sixteen poems are populated by ordinary folks going about the extraordinary business of surviving the tension of time. Without the keen eye and insight of the narrative voice, however, these people, these moments, might otherwise go unnoticed. Shields sees them: the suburban woman kept awake by the sound of a cow, an amnesiac who steals a truck full of breakfast foods, the evangelical plumber who mistakes the Rapture in the glint of an airplane, and an elderly woman pushing her Pomeranians in a stroller towards an ominous hill. These unprecedented and mysterious encounters make up the fullness of this strange tapestry of our lives. While our challenges may feel Sisyphean, something like hope hums, like the soft light of a lamp, on the outskirts of these experiences, reminding us, Shields writes, that an early evening hue goes quite a long way toward softening the edges.

--Hayley Mitchell Haugen, Founding Editor, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions