Shelter - Softcover

"In a volume as compassionate as it is unsettling, Carey Salerno questions the moral authority assumed in the narrow confines of the animal shelter. Abu Ghraib haunts these lines as the shelter takes on harrowing, allusive dimensions, and as the narrator weighs her burden of complicity. "Shelter "is filled with fierce and desperate yowling, much of it our own."--Michael Waters

."..direct, exquisitely evocative...Salerno tells what's hard to hear or admit...She tells what she knows, making the revealing both gripping and reverberating...[I]t is in works as emotionally daring and exposing as this that the political and personal merge. Unselfconsciously, nakedly, Salerno offers elucidation, internal and external, of the condition we comfortably call human."--"Pleiades"

."..Salerno unfolds a story that we cannot stop reading--though...the bare truth on the page hurts... This first collection takes courage to read, but you can bet it took more courage to write, and we should be glad Salerno did it."--"Library Journal"

."..this is real poetry, millennial poetry...[it] links our humanity to the way we treat animals we don't want... "Shelter" is a hard book to read, but the lessons humans need aren't always easy."--"The Bark"

"This is a powerful collection...fierce evocative poems...""Kingdom Books"

"This caring for animals and the shelter we seek becomes a universal...a lasting image of this book which makes Salerno's "Shelter", written in a poised and humane manner, a keeper.""Gently Read Lit"

"Carey Salerno's poems are parables. Her ear tries words and her words find our moral lapses. At the shelter the fated animals are treated with kindness or euthanized, and the poet with unflinching gaze insists we do not turn away from the light or the darkness. Any person with a pet will want to read these honest poems."--Carol Frost

Disturbing because of the cruelty intended as kindness to animals and the speaker's unflinching, relentless insistence on her culpability, these poems force us to consider whether we can be redeemed by our capacity for love, compassion, and personal responsibility.