Shelley Puhak Books in Order

These poems move between historical figures and overlooked lives, linking private desires to political violence. Stalin, Nazi Germany, refugees, and suburban America become settings for intimate voices that examine ambition, cruelty, memory, and the capacity for kindness.

Historical and mythical figures speak through these poems, with women taking many of the central roles. Their voices revisit familiar stories from different perspectives, questioning inherited accounts and giving overlooked characters room to answer back.

Guinevere and Lancelot conduct their doomed affair in contemporary Baltimore through a sequence of dramatic monologues. Arthurian legend meets corporate life and economic insecurity as the poems explore love, aging, betrayal, and failures to live by one's ideals.

A series of poetic portraits explores how artistic identity changes through motherhood, work, politics, and historical memory. Everyday encounters and public crises raise questions about the responsibilities of making art and the unstable self that creates it.

Brunhild and Fredegund rise from very different backgrounds to rule rival realms in the Merovingian world. Their political skill, warfare, and long conflict reshape early medieval Europe, while later accounts obscure their achievements beneath hostile legend.

Elizabeth Bathory's reputation as a prolific murderer has endured for centuries. Drawing on archival evidence, Shelley Puhak revisits the accusations, political conflicts, and eventual downfall of a powerful woman whose life became entangled with monstrous legend.