Time Under Tension

Take a drive back out to the suburb of the mind in Jimmie Shields' Time Under Tension--a wry and reflective tapestry of memory, and an eerie portrait of the bizarre in the mundane. Its title hints not only toward the stubborn and numbing stresses of a life, but also toward the almost metaphysical strangeness of being pulled along time's conveyor belt. Of simply being alive at all. And it's through this tension that the poems soar toward sudden, striking moments of mental clarity. Or delusion. Into wonder or into darkness. Like many of the book's odd scenes and characters, it all depends on how you choose to look.