Shame / Shame

"[An] engaging first book of prose and free-verse poems. Bending to the expectation that prose narrates, he fashions miniature stories—anecdotes, jokes
maybe—about not humiliation but existential embarrassment, the conviction that surely being human shouldn't entail the feelings it does. . . . Besides prose poetry, Becker has also mastered e. e. cummings’ skinny, crawl-down-the-page poem, to similar, gotta-read-it-again effect."

—Booklist

"When God was still too young to know any better, he touched 'THE VOID,' which, 'in a rush to fill the space His finger left,/...sent out a universe in ripples.' It shamed God that He'd disturbed perfection. He needed a toy. What He came up with (and then discarded to us) was the world Devin Becker evokes in these uncommonly intimate pages. If there are items in Becker's life too small or humbling to elude his gift for turning them into irresistible news, not one of them has slipped past him into the graces of this, his first (extremely welcome) book."

—James McMichael

"Devin Becker has written a drop-dead funny book about desolation, isolation, self-punishment, and shame. Only one for whom humor is a necessity really understands humor. Jokes can be a means of survival and almost redemptive if they make inchoate private suffering communal through its expression, and, like poems, the vitality of jokes depends on rhetorical skill, emotional authenticity, luminous intelligence, and impeccable timing-all characteristics of Devin Becker's writing that makes it so engaging and moving and exhilarating."

—Michael Ryan

“Becker isn’t trying to depress you, but to impress upon you the comic relief inherent in an awareness of the double-sidedness of shame—all while trying to capture the mutability of interpretations. He hybridizes the prose poem form with the diary entry in an heretofore unmatched quest to understand how we put our experiences to words, and how narrative both fails us and somehow succeeds. The result is a collection whose multidimensional pieces invite a new experience with every read."

—Sarah Katz, Nano Fiction