Carey Salerno is the Executive Director & Publisher of Alice James Books. Her first book is Shelter (2009), and she is the editor, along with Anne Marie Macari, of the anthology Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books. You may find her poems in print journals and online. www.careysalerno.com

“…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

“[T]his 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

“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