David Shumate

David Shumate is an American poet.

He teaches at Marian University and Butler University.

His work has appeared in North America Review, Mid-American Review,Missouri Review,Mississippi Review, Maize, Southern Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner.

He lives in Zionsville, Indiana.

The unbearable lightness of many of these poems is just that—unbearable.

At their best Shumate's prose poems offer taut, timeless parables whose morals prove complex without loss of clarity, perhaps because of the soothing precision of his voice.

In The Floating Bridge, David Shumate vanquishes once and for all the notion that the prose poem is somehow inherently ‘not a real poem.’ This collection exhibits a sustained level of innate lyricism and imagism rarely seen even in conventional lyric free verse. They are densely concentrated distillations of minute moments in time, space, and psychology, volatile, possibly even explosive. Unfailingly, the little prose jewels in The Floating Bridge exhibit the most fundamental property of fine poetry: each whole is many times greater than the sum of its parts.

David Shumate's devotion to the prose poem is persuasive evidence of its movement in from the margins (or perhaps of poetry's movement out to the margins). For most of its history, the prose poem has been associated primarily with experimentalists. But Shumate is not a writer of radical ambition. High Water Mark: Prose Poems reads like the work of a conversational free-verse poet who has decided that line breaks are a needless vestigial reflex.

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