A collection of progressively lengthy poems that tenderly perpend life's attendant existential concerns

In her fourth collection of poems, Shake Until Cloudy, Oakland-based writer Amanda Nadelberg returns with a unique sense of humor, readjusting the commonplace from an angle that will inspire wonder in her readers. The book begins with a series of incisive micro-poems, some of which can be recited in a single breath, then leads to longer meditations on love, relationships, personhood and the desire for new beginnings. Filled with tenderness, Nadelberg asks hugely complicated questions of her life that shock with their ostensible simplicity--"Faces appeared in fragments / I didn't remember how to go / going through the world / being who you are." With Shake Until Cloudy, Nadelberg's deft new poems re-create the sway of life: rhythmical, emotional and full of feeling.
Amanda Nadelberg (born 1982) is the author of three previous collections--Isa the Truck Named Isadore (winner of the 2005 Slope Editions Book Prize), Bright Brave Phenomena (Coffee House Press, 2012) and Songs from a Mountain (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in The Nation, Harper's and Hyperallergic. A graduate of Carleton College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she lives in Oakland, California.