Dog and Moon

<p><b>A dreamlike collection of poetry that intertwines an embodied experience of the natural world with mythology, memory, and the creative process</b><br><br> Woven together from fragments collected in notebooks and dream journals over two decades of introspection, <i>Dog and Moon</i> inhabits a space of sleeplessness, enveloped in the darkness of night. Kelly Shepherd draws inspiration from the free-verse ghazal but takes the form and bends it to create a sort of Indra’s Net, with couplets echoing and reflecting across his poems. They are a series of juxtapositions: nature writing placed in conversation with the language of poetry workshops, mythology and childhood memories, and sensorial encounters with the natural world colliding with images of home and belonging. <br><i>My ribs, the mattress’s ribs—I can’t sleep. This is a war,<br> says the newscaster reporting on the winter storm.<br><br> A war with Mother Nature.<br> When a metaphor is taken too far it becomes a projectile.<br><br> Try to talk to someone when they’re snorin<br> their responses are all the same. The mind races.<br><br> Happiness is only a purchase away,<br> but what happens when the box store runs out of boxes?<br><br> Time moves differently depending on your bedsprings.<br> From a net of clouds, the moon:<br><br> so much of writing is trying to remember<br> your thoughts from other states of consciousness.<br><br> An inexplicable need to follow<br> the pathways of unseeable sparks and insects in the blankets.</i></p>