Everchild

Gwynn Scheltema writes from every aspect of her wide-lived life with every facet of her bold, courageous, female voice. She gives us everything, everywhere, all at once not without restraint and discernment, but with an exuberant acceptance of self and a tender vulnerability that includes her reader, always, in a gesture of welcome. A startling debut.

In Everchild, Gwynn Scheltema gives us poetry that is clear-headed and clarifying, poetry that both describes experience and creates it. … Her poet’s palette is varied and far-reaching – she can bring Molly Malone back to life as well as take us into the heartland of Zimbabwe. There’s a lifetime in these poems, stories to be told about people and places and the state of the human heart, whether grieving or skipping to the beat of its own music.

“There are toads in my family ... and mango memories, an olive-brown queen coiled in a warm sun.” Compelling and heartbreaking. The poems filled with longing, pain, a sensuous observation of a journey looking to repair itself. These poems can crack a hard shell. It is worth one’s own contemplation.