By Helen Pruitt Wallace

Shimming the Glass House is the winner of the 2007 Richard Snyder Publication Prize and the winner of the Bronze Medal for the 2008 Poetry category of the Florida Book Awards.

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"In her first book, Helen Wallace explores a range of subjects with lush language and a formal deftness that are deeply gratifying. If there is a presiding theme here, it is the tension between our ‘struggle for precision’ and the poignant fact of the imperfection all around and within us. Whether celebrating domestic life or evoking global concerns, Wallace captures the beauty in what is flawed and the flaw in what is beautiful. ‘So much of what we love is born of loss,’ she tells us. And while the world Wallace renders is a broken one, in these poems it has been honed to brightness on the strop of her passionate sensibility.  This is a wonderful debut."

- Enid Shomer

"Like Robert Frost's, these poems have a lover's quarrel with the world.  Their words and music throw light over dark places, and find meanings and leanings in the smallest details.   Helen Wallace's first book is a remarkably wise and moving collection."

- Peter Meinke

"The poems in this wonderful book have roots deep in the old, silent America: Dickinson's bedroom, Thoreau's little patch by the pond. Yet life thrives here in all its gorgeous and messy abundance; there are cheerleaders, tacos, a sixth grade science fair, the ‘sprayed turret’ of a beehive hairdo. These are the loudest quiet poems I've ever read."

- David Kirby

• Reviewed in Pleiades 30:2, Summer 2010
• Reviewed in Apalachee Review, #59, Spring 2009
• Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award, 4/28/2009
• Reviewed in Third Coast, Spring 2009
• Reviewed in North Florida News Daily, 12/15/2008
• Reviewed in Tucson Weekly, 11/20/2008
• "Middle School Social Rules" appeared on Poetry 365, #136

About the Author

Helen Pruitt Wallace's first collection of poems, Shimming the Glass House, was the winner of the 2007 Richard Snyder Prize and recipient of the 2008 Bronze Medal in the Florida Book Awards. Co-editor of the anthology Isle of Flowers published by Anhinga Press, Wallace has published poems in The Literary Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Cumberland Review, Nimrod International, Tampa Review, and other journals. She’s received a McKay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award, The dA Center for the Arts Poetry Award, a residency fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.