Shirley Rickett’s Tales weaves memoir and poetry into an unflinching life story shaped by memory, art, and the questions that linger after growing up.
KANSAS CITY, MO, UNITED STATES, January 30, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Spanning the Great Depression, World War II, and the decades that followed, Tales: Memoir and Poems of an American Woman by poet and memoirist Shirley Rickett has recently been released, offering an intimate and formally inventive portrait of a life shaped by family, art, and survival within twentieth-century America.
Blending memoir, prose, and poetry, the book traces a woman’s life from early childhood through later adulthood, revealing how historical forces are absorbed through everyday experience. Set primarily in Kansas City and rural Kentucky and Tennessee, the book captures scenes of childhood and early adulthood shaped by poverty, migration, faith, and family bonds. Ordinary settings, such as shoe shops, backyards, movie houses, churches, and dance studios, become the places where identity, ethics, and imagination are formed.
The memoir sections are marked by close observation and emotional restraint, addressing difficult subjects such as alcoholism, domestic fear, sexual violence, and the long psychological aftermath of war. These experiences are presented without sentimentality or spectacle, allowing memory to unfold with clarity while acknowledging both what was spoken within families and what remained unspoken.
Interwoven poems provide moments of compression and reflection throughout the book. Recurring images, dance shoes worn thin, folded parachutes, musical rhythms, and movie screens flickering in dark theaters, signal endurance, care, and continuity. Art, particularly dance, music, literature, and film, appears as a sustaining force rather than an escape, offering language and structure for experiences that resist easy explanation.
“I didn’t set out to write a memoir in the usual sense,” Shirley said in a recent interview. “I wanted to follow memory the way it actually moves, through images, fragments, and moments of attention. Writing this book meant returning to the places where silence lived alongside love, and letting both speak without apology.”
The book also reflects on mentorship and surrogate family relationships, including the influence of a great uncle whose generosity and intellectual curiosity opened paths beyond economic hardship. Acts of teaching, storytelling, and shared attention to art illustrate how small gestures can redirect a life.
In its later sections, the book turns toward myth and fairy tale, revisiting figures such as Demeter, Cinderella, and the Frog Prince through a contemporary feminist lens. These retellings emphasize transformation, endurance, and interior life, extending the book’s inquiry into how stories are inherited, revised, and reclaimed over time.
Written with a steady, compassionate, and unsparing voice, the book speaks to readers interested in women’s life writing, intergenerational memory, trauma and recovery, and the ethical role of storytelling. The book also affirms the creative vitality of later life, showing how reflection and artistic risk deepen with age.
With Tales: Memoir and Poems of an American Woman newly released, Rickett is already turning toward her next project, New and Selected Poems: Cicada, 1976–2022, a sweeping retrospective that gathers more than forty years of poetry into a single volume.
Tales: Memoir and Poems of an American Woman is now available on Amazon. For more information, visit https://shirleyricketttheauthor.com/.
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About the Author
Shirley Rickett has been writing and publishing for five decades. She holds an MA in Education and an MA in English and was a staff member at New Letters magazine at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Her work has received a Colgate University fellowship, a Pushcart nomination, and funding from the UMKC Women’s Council for research in Norway, interviewing adult children of Nazis. Her books include A Minute of Arc, Dinner in Oslo, Love: Poems for Vintage Love Song Titles, Transplant, Cicada: New and Selected Poems, and Tales: Memoir and Poems of an American Woman. She lives and writes in Kansas City, Missouri, with her husband and their rescue dog.
Shirley Rickett
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