When I Smoked Pot with my Daughter

In When I Smoked Pot with My Daughter, Shelley Townsend-Hudson's poems are still, clear pools that refresh because they come so directly from the source. Of raising daughters, it could be said, "it's complicated," but she says so much more. On one level, they are easy to understand; on another, emotional level, they challenge us. Also, there are images that delight, as when "hail popcorned off the deck." Delicious!

- DON RIGGS,

Shelley Townsend-Hudson graces us with a collection of tender and observant poems about raising three daughters with her husband. In spite of - or, more likely, because of - their rich particularity, these poems bring me back to the nearly forgotten days of my wife and I raising our own two children and bring me forward to the present in which our home is often filled with four grandchildren in all stages of charm and sheer obstinacy. From toys on the floor to first experiments with makeup, Townsend-Hudson charts the paths of childhood with a poet's eye and a mother's heart. There are doubts galore along the way as to whether she has been the mother she wanted to be, but there are also moments in which "Assurance came like a little / shell somewhere on the ocean floor opening / to take me in." This little book will open to take you in as well.

- PAUL J. WILLIS, author of Somewhere to Follow

SHELLEY TOWNSEND-HUDSON is an award-winning poet, a dancer, and a musician. She was born in Lenoir, North Carolina, and now divides her time between Ada, Michigan, and Old Salem, North Carolina. When she's not writing, she's playing banjo with the old-time string band Gooder'n Grits.