Just Breathe Normally

Painful healing from a freak bicycle accident burns at the heart of this collection of lyrical anecdotes by Alaskan poet Shumaker. From the moment of impact with a wild-driving kid on an ATV in 2000, as the author is cycling along a highway in Fairbanks with her husband, Joe, she must find a way back from near-death to a meaningful life. Her work is a combination of diarylike entries made during and after her recovery (she suffered from a skull fracture, small strokes, a collapsed lung and a broken finger) and memories from childhood growing up with a frustrated single mom in Tucson, Ariz. These past snippets reveal her mother’s Norwegian farm roots and early, bitter, short-lived marriage to the man who got her pregnant; subsequently, Shumaker, as the oldest sibling, had to care for her two younger sisters and brother as their mother spiraled downward, working low-wage jobs, bringing men home and suffering increasing ill health from asthma. In the present sections, the author, hospitalized on and off as her injury-related ailments recur, has to decide to forgive or prosecute the rough-riding boy on the ATV, who is 17 and grudgingly contrite about the accident. Overall, the past and present sections overlap uneasily and seem to constitute two separate literary enterprises, although Shumaker’s prose possesses throughout a limpid serenity. (Sept.)