Praise for Lambflesh:

“Caroline Shea’s Lambflesh crackles with stark and magic-stung survival songs, asks ‘what bloom or blight / will make a home in me,’ asks what balm or gauze or ‘scavenged relics’ for trauma, for generational ailments, for pain and its haunted memory seeping through the blood. These poems are dark and potent and myth-heavy; they unbandage the stigma from mental health issues and sing ‘as refusal of erasure.’”

Jenn Givhan, Girl with Death Mask and Rosa’s Einstein

“‘Unstitch me and wear me as a pelt, a blood-and-guts ball gown,’ writes the speaker of Caroline Shea’s Lambflesh, an invitation charged with ruthless longing, mixing violence and horror with the intoxicating language of desire. The body depicted in these poems is ‘always / a negotiation,’ at once a stranger (‘Zoo of lung and stubborn tissue’) and a dear, familiar friend (‘Oh, you old girl / you unthanked junk’). The speaker meditates on these twin feelings of belonging and estrangement— ‘when you see the creature / wearing your old skin // you will know her’ —and marvels at the newness of this body in recovery (‘What is it—to look / in the mirror, turning and turning and think, finally, / I could live here, yes—I live here’). The collection’s rich tonal complexity and gorgeous attention to language contribute to its extraordinary rendering of self-discovery.”

Emily Skaja, Brute

  “I confess: I am drawn to poems that break me into a tenderness I’d never known. Caroline Shea’s Lambflesh does it over and over.  Here is a new voice, verdant with longing, humming ‘the lovely machinery’ of her body, ‘bending towards light.’”

Major Jackson, Roll Deep and The Absurd Man: Poems

“Here, the lyric “I” grapples with the “thing” of her body, and Shea’s first chapbook serves as a primer for that work between lyric abstraction and the object of the body. [...]  Rarely are medical experiences rendered so lucidly. In the poem “Vitals,” the fog of post-anesthesia is experienced through “Dutch half-light / and flies buzzing just out of frame.” “They split my pelt across and now I gaze / with taxidermied eyes.”  Or, “Unstitch me and wear me as a pelt, a blood-and-guts ball gown” from “Viscera.” Can a body in such pain and dismemberment be redeemed by use, by sacrifice? “The body,” Shea continues, “is a room with no exit.” [...] Are our bodies meat for sacrifice or consumption? Are they something to enjoy or survive? Can we be at home in such fragile and limiting habitats? Shea offers no easy answers, but wrestles with the questions until there is blood on the ground. Something may be written there in the dust.”

Michelle Castleberry, Ecotheo Review

Included on Entropy’s December 2019 Small Press Release List