Customer Reviews:

• "Shadows Ink consistently publishes high quality chapbooks with visually stunning full color covers. Both cover and content of Death Settled Well are exquisite. Summers' use of language is imaginative and his metaphors often powerful. Critics have called him a poet with range, focus, and brutal honesty. Poetry editors must agree with that assessment because his work has appeared in many journals.

"Poets" introduces readers to Summers' poetry and serves as fitting harbinger for what will follow. I quote an excerpt here:

        These are the gods
        who prick their fingers
        on rusty nails and show

        me how to bleed, who
        dance with the ghosts
        of dead fathers as grief

        falls from the rafters,
        dusts the air….

This excerpt from "Scavenger Lost" paints an unusual picture for readers through metaphor:

        How strange to see this buzzard
        scratching its talons across
        the green-shingled roof that overlooks

        the pond, wings hunched like arthritic
        shoulders, hands buried deep
        in dark pockets. His face, a twisted

        radish, gazes up through the blue….

"Methuselah Knew" brings that Old Testament patriarch to life. This excerpt shows him to be a man at ease with himself and the ghosts of a long life:

        Methuselah avoided stepping on ants,
        understood the worth of a thick beard.
        His memory pocketed friends
        like specks of jasper and gypsum.
        He polished them at twilight
        recalling the strength of their handshakes,
        the slant of their smiles.

"Intimations on Mortality by Linus Van Pelt" is an imaginative memorial to an aging Snoopy. What if our intrepid canine hero should die? Will we remember his playful past, the pretend wars he fought?

        His war will end soon.
        We'll bury him at dusk
        besides his splintered red
        house. Schroeder will bring
        his piano, play Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
        Charlie, Lucy, and Sally will wait
        for me to say something comforting and wise.

From the unanticipated death of a frog and the loss of a comic strip dog, to the dying leaves of fall and Methuselah contemplating the ghosts of dead sons and friends, Summers writes of death and loss. That he does it with humor and clear-eyed compassion is a tribute to his skill as poet. This chapbook is exceptional and highly recommended." - Laurel Johnson, Midwest Book Review