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From “Certification”:
. . . shave a bit of tabby fur, pump the forearm
a little harder this time, careful with the needle,
not too deep. Even the drugged cat’s ears
press the skull. She cannot miss its vein, focusing
solely on the twenty-five cents raise. Wasn’t that enough
to lean over and stab the heart, humor the vet’s
sensitivity? Compassion: the slabbed certificate
on the wall reads so. In the name
of all holies she, he, anyone willing
to work for minimum wage may kill.
“In a volume as compassionate as it is unsettling, Carey Salerno questions the moral authority assumed in the narrow confines of the animal shelter. Abu Ghraib haunts these lines as the shelter takes on harrowing, allusive dimensions, and as the narrator weighs her burden of complicity. Shelter is filled with fierce and desperate yowling, much of it our own.”—Michael Waters
"...direct, exquisitely evocative...Salerno tells what's hard to hear or admit...She tells what she knows, making the revealing both gripping and reverberating...[I]t is in works as emotionally daring and exposing as this that the political and personal merge. Unselfconsciously, nakedly, Salerno offers elucidation, internal and external, of the condition we comfortably call human."—Pleiades
"...Salerno unfolds a story that we cannot stop reading—though...the bare truth on the page hurts... This first collection takes courage to read, but you can bet it took more courage to write, and we should be glad Salerno did it."—Library Journal
"...this is real poetry, millennial poetry...[it] links our humanity to the way we treat animals we don’t want... Shelter is a hard book to read, but the lessons humans need aren’t always easy."—The Bark
“This is a powerful collection…fierce evocative poems...”Kingdom Books
“This caring for animals and the shelter we seek becomes a universal…a lasting image of this book which makes Salerno’s Shelter, written in a poised and humane manner, a keeper.”Gently Read Lit
"Carey Salerno's poems are parables. Her ear tries words and her words find our moral lapses. At the shelter the fated animals are treated with kindness or euthanized, and the poet with unflinching gaze insists we do not turn away from the light or the darkness. Any person with a pet will want to read these honest poems."—Carol Frost
Carey Salerno earned her MFA in poetry from New England College. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in such journals as Rattle and Natural Bridge. She currently works in publishing and lives with her husband in Boston.