Boneyard Heresies, Tina Schumann’s forth poetry collection. is an investigation of personhood as seen through the prisms of magical thinking, grief, the dreamland of memory, and the vagaries of love. These often self-deprecating and at times darkly humorous inquiries are built around a scaffolding of self-portraits, epistles, and elegies. Ultimately, the collection explores the inevitable terminus of all living things, the ironic and faulty constructs of a rapidly moving world, and one’s place in the human tribe.
Boneyard Heresies
$14.95
Poems by Tina Schumann
978-0-913785-75-1 Paper
February 2025
Tina Schumann, a finalist in the National Poetry Series, is the author of Praising the Paradox (Red Hen Press); Requiem. A Patrimony of Fugues (Diode Editions), winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition; and As If (Parlor City Press), winner of the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. She is Editor of Two Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents (Red Hen), an Independent Publisher Book Award-winning anthology. Schumann’s work has received the American Poet Prize from The American Poetry Journal, runner-up status in the 2023 annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize from The Missouri Review, and finalist status in the Terrain.org annual poetry contest. Her work received honorable mentions in The Atlantic and Crab Creek Review as well as an Editors’ Choice in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. She serves as a poetry editor with Wandering Aengus Press. Her poems have appeared in publications and anthologies since 1999, including The American Journal of Poetry, Ascent, Catamaran, Cimarron Review, Diode, Hunger Mountain Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nimrod, Parabola, Palabra, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily, and on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. She can be found at tinaschumann.com.
“I am a Time Machine,” writes Tina Schumann. And it’s true; this collection of poems brings past and present intimately and gloriously together, jostling inside the speaker. What is inherited and what must be borne speak to each other to create a tender portrait: a ‘history that was never yours,’ Schumann writes. Family, desire, and loss—’the hard gulp of fact’—are lovingly and bluntly examined. The poems about the death of the mother make me weep in their authenticity. This is a fine book by a poet with a sharp eye and an open heart.
—Fleda Brown, author of The Woods Are on Fire: New and Selected Poems and former poet laureate of Delaware
“Tina Schumann’s Boneyard Heresies bridges the gulf between the living and the dead. One imagines the divide to be insurmountable, yet these poems with their vast imagination, bravery, and power of description demonstrate ‘how … the actual / and the evoked converge.’ These poems are lived in, copious with earthly things, tangible with the ‘reverberations of other lives.’ They travel, yet they reside comfortably in the in-between, the limbo, the hiatus, and, in turn, through memory, dreams, evocation, and storytelling, they transcend.”
—Joseph O. Legaspi, author of Threshold and cofounder of Kundiman
“The poems in Boneyard Heresies are smart, funny, and chiseled. They look behind the curtain of the self; the voice both conceals and reveals. The poems are tied to the past and the present, while the poet uses a microscope to move the psychic distance closer or farther away. Schumann stays attentive to ways the inward can find passage into the immediacy of lived experience. Nothing is preordained, but the process of transformation is there in poem after poem.”
—Sean Singer, author of Today in the Taxi and winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets
“‘Straight talker / and midnight caller’—Tina Schumann is both. In every poem, a poignant moment, carried our way by a steely eye and a tender heart. Boneyard Heresies is a treasure, its poems lasting far beyond their moments, reminding us of the astonishing buoyancy of the spirit.
—Nance Van Winckel, author of The Many Beds of Martha Washington and Sister Zero
Distributed for Moon City Press.