Nonfiction. For those of us who have followed Lewis Turco’s inventive and engaging poems over the years, SHAKING THE FAMILY TREE is a welcome revelation. His reminiscences of youth and family offer warmth and insights into a body of work that tracks his coming to terms with a heritage and legacy of veracity. One can see one’s own self in the events and situations he so carefully describes. For those who may be introduced to Turco by these accounts, they offer a valuable guide to an always lively, changing, and challenging writer -Jerome Mazzaro, University of California, Davis.