Driving Together

Tyler Robert Sheldon's first full-length poetry collection is a gem, a culmination of years of study and effort. As an MA student Tyler impressively published more than forty poems individually, demonstrating both his industry and his ambition, his talent and grit. With his MFA in Creative Writing currently in progress and this book complete, Tyler takes the next step as a poet and educator. With this collection, his audience and reach quickly extend. Tyler's life is both ordinary and extraordinary, and he charts some of his journey in verse in this book. He does so with hope and pluck, with a kind of simple, clear vision. What he sees, we see. from the foreword, by Kevin Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas, 2017-2019 Tyler Robert Sheldon's Driving Together excavates a family history and maps its place in Kansas with a storyteller's mind and a poet's precision. These poem's honor Sheldon's identical twin brother who died after a "small handful of hours," and give a language for the spaces we make for the lives that were too short: "I see you behind my eyelids, and touch / you as I pluck a leaf from concrete." Sheldon writes to illuminate how loss defines a place-"Our best scenery / is not on the ground"-and in doing so, preserves what is fleeting. Ruth Awad, author of Set to Music a Wildfire