In Sunshine or in Shadow: Poems for Every Season

What if the Brontës had a brother? What if they grew up in the early 2000s? What if they wrote about the agonies of being rejected via text message and the joys of finding dates who read books?

In this volume, the lives of three sibling dreamers play out in verse, threading enchantment into the challenges of growing up. As they find humor in tiny ordeals, meaning in disappointment, and beauty even in tragedy, their poems will open your heart, offering vulnerability and transparency on every page. In Sunshine or in Shadow is a treasure of laughter and tears that will stay with you forever.


Editorial Reviews:

'Underscoring these poems is a profound yearning to break open the world, and to be broken in turn, with the knowledge that the unmatched love of family will be there to pick up the pieces.'

-DJ Hills, author of Leaving Earth

'This book is an invitation to feel something. If you've been out of touch with your ability to see, to seek, then by all means, wander in this world of misty-eyed dreamers and grapple with what it means to be alive, to suffer loss, to experience joy, to face death.'

-Seth Johnson, author of Generational Verse

'These disarming poems, aimed at that elusive audience of readers who don't normally read poetry, do a beautiful job of introducing the art.'

-Chris Nealon, author of The Shore

'To read In Sunshine or in Shadow is to be invited into the private language of siblings. Peterson, Flaherty, and Angel's poems chart an intimate emotional landscape of joy and disappointment, of grief and triumph in a manner that is at once anchored to literary tradition and entirely singular. This volume is homelike in the best possible way.'

-Grant Shreve, Washington Post contributor