Books

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Carnivalia – Fiction – 2018 Gold Wake Press

“Glenn Shaheen is a fucking genius.”

– Randa Jarrar, author of Him, Me, Muhammad Ali and A Map of Home

“Glenn Shaheen’s Carnivalia reads like a firework display: the stories explode, dazzle, and you never know what’s coming next. Fast stories that will stick with you a long time.”

– Mat Johnson, author of Pym and Loving Day.

“Carnivalia is the kind of collection that seems to have captured the brilliance of the moment just after waking from a dream: at once compelling the reader to hold on to every strange imagined detail, and to surface and let the concrete demands of the real world come into sharp focus. This is a stunning book.”

– Danielle Evans, author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

“The characters in Glenn Shaheen’s Carnivalia want desperately to be understood, and in their attempts they reveal not only deeper, more complex truths about themselves but also of our culture. It takes a major talent to do what Shaheen does in his stories. This book is a must-read.”

– Andrew Brininstool, author of Crude Sketches Done In Quick Succession

Available for preorder from Gold Wake Press!

 

Energy Corridor

Energy Corridor – Poetry – 2016 University of Pittsburgh Press

“The American roller coaster of economic and psychologic inflation and deflation is Energy Corridor’s timely subject, the city of Houston its genius loci. Glenn Shaheen brings a laser eye to national, neighborly, and personal iniquities large and small, because ‘the direction I am trying to travel / is home.’ Through ‘measurements of stress, strata, fortune’ this book bristles and pops.”

– Dana Levin

“It’s a hard-to-accept fact: most poems written today barely matter, if at all. Glenn Shaheen’s do. That’s all you need to know.”

– Hayan Charara

Available  from a local independent bookstore, or, if you have to, Amazon.

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Unchecked Savagery – Fiction – 2013 Ricochet Editions

“These miniature worlds celebrate the strange and the ordinary, burger shacks and full moons and a woman who has a crisis of faith over Soul Train. Glenn Shaheen blends the laugh-out-loud funny with a wistful wisdom so cutting you might feel a little bad that you laughed. ‘What children we are of disappointment and luxury,’ a character tells us, and the reader nods: disappointment in ourselves or our lovers or Soul Train, maybe, but never a moment of disappointment in these stories.”

– Caitlin Horrocks

Available for purchase through the Ricochet Editions webpage and SPD.

 

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Predatory – Poetry – 2011 University of Pittsburgh Press

Winner of the 2010 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize in Poetry

Finalist for the 2011 Norma Farber First Book Prize

“Glenn Shaheen is claiming new ground for American poetry. His poems are about the nightmares of information overload, collapsing infrastructure, ubiquitous violence, and other ills of late empire. The subjects are not happy, but Shaheen’s clear vision and crisp—often witty—language offer the pleasures of surprise, discovery, and recognition.”
—Ed Ochester

“Glenn Shaheen is sort of a genius at jimmying his spatula into the cracks of contemporary America—the places where the edges don’t quite fit together, where the not-so-funny throbs and baffles, a place where ‘the city grass is killed / by the same chemical in the water designed to keep / our teeth strong.’ And where a surgeon opens a patient’s heart and says ‘there’s a place a lot of love could exist.’ Shaheen’s comedy often goes beyond slapstick and the personal, into a realm of ominous narrative ambiguity that catches, in fact, the tragic nature of our time. Predatory makes a surprising and substantial addition to our literary tradition of the reckless, dead-serious-funny.”
—Tony Hoagland

“The narrator of these poems is subversive, vulnerable, maybe brilliant, seemingly offhand—he’s your best friend, he is what you fear. Each poem is thrillingly restless, yet the world revealed all seems so apocalyptically familiar, if you have been paying attention, if you have been even half awake. Predatory is a phenomenal first book—who knew a complete guide to catastrophe and mayhem could be so engaging?”
—Nick Flynn

“Thankfully, in Predatory, Glenn Shaheen’s souped-up debut, ‘There’s a tiger behind every door.’ All the great American myths are present. Star Trek. Saran Wrap. The Rothko Chapel. ‘A Pfizer truck T-boning a gasoline truck / in rush hour traffic.’ This is a disparate poetry of local access, end of days, old junk, all the evil in the animal kingdom. And that’s just the start. Shaheen chronicles exactly how it’s come to this: our twenty-first-century global chasm. These are poems for those of us among the unelected. In these pre-Rapturous days, Predatory is visionary.”
—Quan Barry

Available at the following locations, or, preferably, through a locally owned independent bookstore:

Powell’s

Amazon (If you absolutely have to!)

Barnes & Noble

Chapters (In Canada)

Independent Bookstore Finder

The cover features the fantastic artwork of Dawolu Jabari Anderson.