Witch City
(dancing girl press, 2024)
From a young age we are told to learn history so that it does not repeat itself. Yet modern witch hunts continue. This chapbook follows a group of school children as they visit a Salem Witch Trials Exhibit. They encounter objects from the trials and are faced with the real stories of the people that suffered at the hands of hysteria. This chapbook begs the questions: what drives tourists to seek out what victims would do anything to flee, why do modern witch hunts continue, & how does distance contribute to a lack of empathy? At the end of the visit, the students, and by proxy the reader, are asked to consider the nuance of the words: witness, bystander, spectator, & participant.
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City of Contradiction
(Selcouth Station, 2022)
“Schaffer’s poems navigate a city of contradictions. The narrator, like all who live in this city, moves among the ruins of an illustrious past she cannot reach out and touch: in this city, presence and absence are one and the same. And yet this paradox offers the poet her most playful, dazzling surprises...”
-Jessica Harkins, author of The Paled Guest
“These poems take great pleasure in the tension between the ripeness of the present moment and the grandeur of a past that refuses to completely disappear. Tasting both melancholy and intense joy, these are odes to the impossible but seemingly intrinsic human quest for eternity. Schaffer asks a question about afterlives, “How does one locate the source of / a fire when it has already combusted?” This lively, perceptive collection by a young poet attuned to the hallucinatory nature of an ancient city is a dedication to the eros of slow erosion, “dreams of duality / the ruined and the pristine.””
-Sun Yung Shin, author of Unbearable Splendor
