Yellowing Photographs

Poems providing epiphanic moments of affirmation that honor relationships and family life, which are a complex source of joy and pain, are central to Yellowing Photographs. Never compromising tenderness, Shelby Lynn Lanaro does not exploit the heart by providing realistic details such as fingers pruning while peeling potatoes with her mother. One particularly powerful poem depicts how the family tradition of making wine, where juice-soaked wood saturated the musk of the garage, was impacted by the death of a grandfather. Transporting us from everyday experience, Lanaro binds us to her world with sensual detail like a blanket of sassy lilac. Because these poems refuse to let passion and laughter get swallowed up by dailiness, Shelby Lynn Lanaro’s words will stay lodged in the mind and anchored in the heart as reminders of why memories must be preserved, even when their colors fade and edges yellow with the passage of time.-Vivian Shipley

Yellowing Photographs is a lively collection of poems. At times, with its wealth of lovely images, it indulges in the pure beauty of the world about us. At other times it reflects on the distances between us, as in two striking poems, Karma and To the Woman. Perhaps the most accomplished, subtle, and moving poem is Peeling Potatoes with My Mother at the Kitchen Sink, an exploration of a daughter’s desire to bridge the silence as she and her mother work together. It’s a bitter-sweet poem in the midst of a bitter-sweet world.

-Jeff Mock