The second chapbook from Kansas native Tyler Robert Sheldon, Traumas examines loss and remembrance.

PRAISE FOR TRAUMAS

Tyler Sheldon composes poems to place in the vacancy left in the world by the departure of his twin brother—poems that name what might have been, poems that identify silence as a speaking place, a place to discover the survivor’s vocation: remember, wonder, suffer, and tell.

--Kim Stafford, author of 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared

Tender as a little wave, but tough-eyed as a large shark, Tyler Sheldon’s new chapbook grapples with love and loss. Tyler meditates on the premature death of his infant twin, broken-down college-years cars, and the blossoming love of an artistic couple. In this new work, memory and experience mix. 

--Kevin Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas and author of Songs for My Father


Tyler Sheldon was born to grief, surviving when his twin brother did not. The poems in Traumas explore the “sin” of survival, the losses of twin, of friend, of innocence. Birds accuse, yolks break, yet this fine chapbook—embracing our faulty understanding of grief and loss—brilliantly moves us past scars and toward the wholes we make of our hearts.

--Thomas Fox Averill, O. Henry Award Winner and author of rode