Red Shuttleworth eats tumbleweeds for breakfast. He would rope a few calves before noon if it weren¿t for a bum shoulder. The West settles down in him like a dog in the grass: the sound of his dialogue, the cadences of his characters, the smartness of their responses to one another. But it¿s deeper than that. In Rumors and Borders, there¿s a savage wind off the desert, the hiss of snakes in the rocks, and the faraway whine of a coyote at night. Shuttleworth¿s plays are surprising and unpredictable, poetic and tough. Most of all, his plays are informed by the land that shapes him, the land that shapes the characters who speak through him. -- Julie Jensen, playwrightRed Shuttleworth is one of the finest poets of the American West,past, present, and future. Some of us also know him as one of the finest imaginative living playwrights for a challenged American Theatre.-- Jerry L. CrawfordRed Shuttleworth is a 2017 Tanne Foundation Award recipient. His Woe to the Land Shadowing won the 2016 Western Heritage Wrangler Award for Outstanding Poetry Book. A three-time winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Poetry, Shuttleworth was named ¿Best Living Western Poet¿ in 2007 by True West magazine. His plays have been presented widely, including at State University of New York at Fredonia, Saddleback College, Sundance Playwrights Lab, and the Tony Award-winning Utah Shakespearean Festival.
A tribute to the improbable dreams of valiant men in a rough sport. In this striking poetry collection, Red Shuttleworth, who holds the record as the oldest active boxer (professional or amateur), offers evocative imagery that unapologetically reveals the life of a boxer. From the inspiring hopes of an early career to agonizing defeats, the poems in Eclipse of the Sun take readers on a journey from moderate successes to the realization that a dream of a promising future has become the reality of the long haul of a journeyman. Along the way, Shuttleworth rubs elbows with greats like Muhammad Ali, Chickie Ferrara, and Ron Lyle, exposing the resolute path and difficult end of a hard-lived life. This collection is an homage to boxing at its grittiest levels, and to fighters who persevere—with hope, blood, and bone—against sense and loss. Few professional boxers earn a living in the ring, and even fewer arrive in their forties with any money left from their sport. In this collection, boxers attain poverty rather than riches, end up in post-career menial jobs, and have no pension plan to fall back on. Shuttleworth’s poetry is a visceral inside look at the brutality and humanity at the heart of boxing.
Ghosts & Birthdays is Red Shuttleworth's invocation and - 'levitation with the dead' - a poet's cultural measure of the human menagerie: heroes, villains, antiheroes, writers, painters, boxers, poets, politicos, cowboy robbers, killers - an incredible range of characters in the large world Red Shuttleworth breathes alive. His poetry is always true to reveal human folly - the absurdities that contain a kind of beauty only when articulated by a true poet with a head and a heart. I'm knocked to the mat with what he discovers - his elegiac voice bringing us the ghosts of those about to be lost in the shadows of the digital disintegrating world: Olson, Dorn, Elvis, Ernest, Gabby, Will, Hank, Lyndon, Sonny, Hunter, and don't leave out Gertrude Stein eating popcorn waving fatty arms, at the movies spilling popcorn, laughing.... And on and on... I've always wanted to cross the poetry borders with William Carlos Williams' quote for the Canadian poet, Irving Layton when W.C.W. said of Layton, When I clapped eyes on his poems... I let out a yell of joy! Likewise for me here - and Red Shuttleworth's happy birthday to the whole damn thing!" -- Barry McKinnon, author of In the Millennium and The The (Finalist, 1981, Governor General's Award for Poetry)
Johnny Ringo," an epic biographic poem about the Old West gunfighter, by two-time Spur Award-winning poet Red Shuttleworth, sheds brilliant light on bloody historical events, from Ringo's exclusion from the James-Younger gang to mindless violence in Texas, from accidental fame brought on by dime novels to his spiral into ambition-fueled alcoholism and to employment of his great gift for self-destruction. Shuttleworth's Johnny Ringo paints a vivid, pinpoint-present portrait of a man who was charismatic and larger-than-life, a murderous psychotic to be feared, a spiritually ill man more than a few women wanted to save, a legend who wished to be a god.
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