In a Golden Shovel, a line from another poet is hidden, one word at a time, down the right margin of the poem. I’ve always loved word puzzles, so writing each line towards its end-word is an enjoyable challenge for me, full of surprises along the way. The poets quoted in this chapbook are ones I began to read in my twenties and have revisited often ever since.

The 26 short poems in Sheila Sondik’s Lighting Up the Duff are exquisitely crafted homages to her poetic influences, including Linda Pastan, Maxine Kumin, Kenneth Rexroth, and Terrance Hayes, whose invented form, the Golden Shovel, rules. Although they do not ignore the despair endemic to our times—naysayers, ecological disaster, all doom and zoom—the poems sway like an artist between landscape’s dark shapes and the hours of light, steadily urging us toward hope. Attending to these poems, like tending green plants, is food for our souls.

—Bethany Reid, author of The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm

These poems, more magic windows than weighty shovels, offer encouragement, solace, humor, and intimate company . . . I’ve spent grateful hours in this collection’s shimmering grove, and I’ll walk there again.

—Jed Myers, author of Learning to Hold

Fishing a Familiar Pond is a chapbook of 30 poems “found” by Sheila Sondik by cutting up and rearranging the text of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ classic novel, The Yearling. The poems are an extended meditation on the themes of the novel, including the loss of childhood innocence, our essential bond with the natural world, self-reliance, and the complexity of familial love.

Sheila wrote the poems while participating in The Found Poetry Review’s Pulitzer Remix project in April 2013. She was one of 85 poets who posted poems gleaned from the text of Pulitzer Prize-winning novels on the project website.

Fishing a Familiar Pond was published by Egress Studio Press in June 2013. Poet and book designer Anita K. Boyle designed it and hand-sewed the binding.