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Emily Schulten is the author of three poetry collections, including most recently The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar, a 2023 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist, and the forthcoming Easy Victims to the Charitable Deceptions of Nostalgia, the 2023 White Pines Press Poetry Prize winner. Her poetry and nonfiction appear in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She is currently a professor of English and creative writing at The College of the Florida Keys in Key West, where she lives with her husband and their son.
“You can feel the ocean surf eating away the shores of Emily Schulten’s over-traversed island. “When space and silence [once] existed … .” The land is not only being swallowed by the tide, but by the ever-increasing waves of tourists, by big money and a distorted historical narrative. Earnest and hard-won, Emily Schulten’s Easy Victims to the Charitable Deceptions of Nostalgia. traverses the few spaces still unpopulated to find the semblance of an affirmation of self. Only (this) much is remaindered in the memory—much of which, itself, is to be questioned. Memory and history have become a blur: “This is how a place becomes a postcard ... a folklore of half-truths.” There is loneliness, longing, love, and an attempt to find the self within this last dot of land in an ever-expanding ocean. Is memory simply the residue of embellished folklore? And which of these are other versions of the poet herself? “[Even] the word moves on the page / so that content never remains the same.” Desperately heart-felt, brave, a worthy companion on any island.”—Marc Vincenz “I have no trouble ranking Emily Schulten among our most promising younger poets.”—B.H. Fairchild “These are poems of sacrifice and love, of learning how to live in the real world. They offer no easy answers. Emily Schulten is young and energetic and talented. She will leave her mark on American poetry.”—David Bottoms
