A Wyatt Doyle photograph adorns Bill Shute's latest collection, Lockdown Correspondences.
From Kendra Steiner Editions:
Lockdown Correspondences contains three book-length poems: Tomorrow Won't Bring the Rain, Complementary Angles, and Two Self-Portraits (After Murillo), all written and originally published during the COVID lockdown (2020–2021), combined in one hardcover volume.
"These three works were published independently in 2020 and 2021 and have been well-received, though I myself never thought of them as any kind of trilogy or any unified series of works. However, a number of readers (I've gotten at least a dozen e-mails and texts on this subject) have suggested to me that I should consider combining the three pieces into one book, presented as a document of the pandemic/lockdown, and they argued that there is a consistency within the images/content and form/structure which is perhaps clearer to the reader-consumer than it was to the writer-creator. They also suggested that readers looking for literary responses to the pandemic, now that it is more in the rearview mirror with each passing day, would locate these works more easily in the literary marketplace if they were marketed as 'pandemic poems' in a more obvious manner. I'm certainly happy to oblige, and thus Lockdown Correspondences was created (and this combined volume costs less than the three individual volumes, while also being hardcover). It is also an excellent one-volume introduction to the post-2016 phase of my poetry."
The cover photograph is an original work by Wyatt Doyle of New Texture, whose most recent book (with acclaimed visual artist Jimmy Angelina) is Be Italian!
Shute's work is rooted in the post-Projective Verse poetics of Blackburn, Berrigan, and Eigner, but completely his own. A career-spanning Selected Poems (Junk Sculpture From the New Gilded Age) was published by Moloko Print in Germany in late 2021.
His earlier poetry books include Twelve Gates to the City, Satori in Natchez, Riverside Fugue, Point Loma Purple, and Bridge on the Bayou.
He also wrote the introductory essay to the recent collection Ed Wood, Jr.: When the Topic Is Sex (Bear Manor Media), a 540-page collection of the filmmaker/author's early 1970s non-fiction pieces for adult magazines, and has been a contributor to Ugly Things magazine for 35+ years.
Shute lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.
