Terry Wolverton lingers over words, caresses them, and deftly finds new meanings. I say Brava! as she offers a blues song resonance to Shadow and a startlingly fresh, invigorating energy to Praise. Her sweep from Shadow to Praise is courageous and inviting a clear spiritual trajectory. — Malcolm Boyd, author, Are You Running with Me, Jesus?
Placing her hands on the braille of the future[,] Terry Wolverton yet again distinguishes herself in a new genre, this time in the prose poem. Shadow and Praise unfolds its bittersweet beat in an end-line-word to first-line-word chain of beautiful and surprising poems. Like consciousness itself divining language, her construct delights in what it may find hidden between the small gaps of breath of perception. Emerging from spiritual exile, works of difficult praise, imaginative dedications, smart meditations, all resurrect unpredictable self-reveries. Shadow and Praise works bodily, in one motion, and like the pulse, persists persists with brutal elegance. Lyrically volatile, not unlike life itself, and marvelous in its vision, Wolverton's new book skillfully works on the mind and the memory like the sojourn art of translation: — it feels like flying now like a tightrope walker with a second chance, cherished mystery. — Elena Karina Byrne, author, The Flammable Bird
True to Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki's essay praising shadow, Terry Wolverton seeks the shadow in its myriad forms and honors it. Her latest collection, Shadow and Praise, begins with the opening line, "Born in Bomb's shadow," taking us right here to post 9/11 America, where "optimism [is] a lapsed fashion" and "we are ghost ships drifting through this/ lost century." In a fascinating array of prose poems, reminiscent of Pablo Neruda's odes, Wolverton praises everything from denial, supermarkets, and spoons to eggshells, winking, even traffic on LA's dreadful 405 freeway. Wise, irreverent, honest ("Girly, everything you know is wrong"), and always passionate in her affirmations, Wolverton succeeds in her quest to "help me learn to praise it all/ open my heart to every blessed thing." — Amy Uyematsu, author, Stone, Bow, Prayer
Just when you think you might know what Terry Wolverton is up to, what she might do next, you don't. The poems in Shadow and Praise turn dark, then darker, then wry, then poignant, then terrifying, then luminous. A series of taut, shadowy sonnets is followed by a series of prose poems in praise of everything from the poet's doppelganger — "She borrows my dreams, returns them smudged, broken" "to traffic on the 405 freeway. Linked in sly and always surprising ways, the poems together make a cinematic whole, fierce and mysterious as film noir. "I've fallen so much it feels like flying now," she says as she puts the eyes back in our heads. — Cecilia Woloch, author, Late