Free Speech: poem sequences

by Eric Paul Shaffer

Overview

Eric Paul Shaffer's Free Speech includes two poem sequences addressing the endangered species of liberty in the American vernacular. First, Road Sign Suite presents poems of vehicular freedom inspired by familiar and surprising highway signs on an open road trip through the asphalt and interstate guts of the nation. Then, Restoring Lady Liberty explores constitutional freedom during the national renewal as the Statue of Liberty struggles to maintain the ideal while the torch passes from light to gold. The essay "Between a Road and a Gold Place: An Interface," welds the two sequences together, statue to interstate. In these poems, America has never been clearer in traffic sign, iron structure, or clashing symbols.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587750564
Publisher:	Coyote Arts LLC
Publication date:	03/18/2025
Pages:	102
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.24(d)

About the Author

Eric Paul Shaffer is the author of nine books of poetry, including Lāhaina Noon; Portable Planet; Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen; AMillion-Dollar Bill; Even Further West; and Green Leaves. More than 600 of his poems have been published in the USA, Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Scotland, and Wales. Shaffer received Hawai'i's 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature, a 2006 Ka Palapala Po'okela Book Award for Lāhaina Noon, and the 2009 James M. Vaughan Award for Poetry. He won a fellowship to attend the Summer 2006 Fishtrap Writers Workshop and was a visiting poetry faculty member at the 23rd Annual Jackson Hole Writers Conference in 2015. Shaffer lives on the island of O'ahu.