Homeslice

By Dayton J. Shafer

Dayton J. Shafer's HOMESICE is a regaling, a rhapsodizing on a singular swath of millennialhood-the '81-'85 babies, the elders. Part document, part performance, part poetry, these call-and-response nonfiction monologues address and deconstruct the turn of the millennium's most repressed issues-privilege and enabling, communal trauma, cognitive d

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alternating Current Press
• Release date: Aug 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781946580382

Dayton J. Shafer

DAYTON J. SHAFER's pieces have been featured in fringe festivals, barns, abandoned factories, converted laundromats, black boxes, street sides, and with Vermont Public Radio, the Susan Calza Gallery, PoemCity, and Split Lip Magazine. He's a former writing fellow at Vermont Studio Center, managing editor of Hunger Mountain Literary Journal, and grant recipient from the Montpelier Public Arts Commission.

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Advance Praise

"Dayton J. Shafer’s poetry chapbook Homeslice is a phenomenal, poignant debut about a young man and nation coming of age at the turn of the 21st century. Daring, delightful, and brave, Homeslice conjures an atmosphere of communal call-and-response, and invites the reader to participate with the provocation, ‘Is Your American Dream—?’ With tenderness and vulnerability, Shafer glides beneath the smooth allure of the American Dream to confront ‘those first tastes of life & death,’ racism, othering, consent, misogyny, and gun violence that map the speaker’s kaleidoscopic childhood. Homeslice charts how the hopeful, cool, and impossibly edgy ’90s give way to the tumultuous, violent, and isolating traumas of the 21st century. But despite coming of age in a culture borne of desperation and fear, the speaker demonstrates an avid curiosity about the world, oneself, and the imagination of others. The poems in Homeslice blossom with ‘the first inklings of other worlds’ and celebrate ‘an imagination-first life.’ Creativity, introspection, and ‘say[ing] the unsayable’ are the hallmarks of Shafer’s luminous power as a writer. And Homeslice is a superb example of the avant-garde confronting ‘unprocessed trauma.’ As a poet, Shafer is unafraid to break the fourth wall. His writing is curiosity-filled, propulsive, and startling as Homeslice inspires new human connection and new stories to be told while the American canon shifts again."

—Rita Banerjee, author of Echo in Four Beats, A Night with Kali, and Credo: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing

"Homeslice unabashedly interrogates and delights in the hardest issues of our nation—race, class, sexuality, violence, familial and communal trauma. Shafer is honest about his own culpability, but these soliloquies are never dour.