The poems in Amye Archer's A Shotgun Life are suffused with hard-won, sometimes reluctant insights. Healing doesn't always happen how or when we think it will; what at first seemed a nasty surprise can develop to be your deep heart's blessing. With frankness, perseverance, and wry good humor, Archer charts her way from betrayal and divorce to new love and motherhood, without ever losing the ability to calculate the losses along with the gains.
Christine Gelineau, author of Appetite for the Divine

The poems in this chapbook create an endless series of perfectly realized moments between lovers and once-were lovers and fathers and daughters and mothers and daughters or would-be children. There is sorrow and joy and anger in these poems, but always, there is the strength of Archer's voice and her unflinching willingness to cut herself open and bleed beautifully, recklessly onto the page.
Roxane Gay, author of Ayiti and editor of PANK Magazine

Digging down into the turbulent topography of the post-modern family romance, Amye Archer’s A Shotgun Life is a fiercely honest exploration of the slow motion eruptions and unexpected life events through which we surge as we’re carried down the “darkening road we’ve yet to meet.” The poems in this volume skillfully portray a burning, fierce loyalty to the lessons (both endearing and enduring) learned from a close study of familial and erotic love—all told through the experienced voice of a narrator whose vision is just clear enough to remind us that keeping the “ancestral anchor slung over our shoulders” may be the only way to keep us grounded, and in doing so, deliver us safely to our “new respite from the world.”
Tony Morris, author of Back to Cain