Stalking the Florida Panther
The Word Works, 1987

Winner of the Word Works Washington prize, 1985

In this fine first book the eternal themes of love, loss, unrequital, and forgiveness come together with the characters to form a remarkably unified whole. To enter here is to meet and be moved by the gambling father, the long-lost lover, a Jewish child's version of Jesus, women at the tomato packing plant, and Old World ancestors, all fully realized. Shomer's talent is fully mature and should gain her rapid recognition.

—Maxine Kumin

I don't know when I have read a new collection of poems with such excitement as Stalking the Florida Panther. For some time I have been watching the rising star of Enid Shomer. What a delight now to be rewarded again and again with breath-stopping phrases and images; to have whole novels of experience spilled onto single pages. Shomer's poetry is compelling. Having started, I couldn't put the book down.
—Judson Jerome

Selected Works

Novel
The Twelve Rooms of the Nile
To be published in 2012 by Simon and Schuster both in the U.S. and in the U.K.
Short Fiction
Tourist Season
"Beautifully made, surprising and inevitable, wonderfully inventive and deeply true"
—Pam Houston
Imaginary Men
"Remarkable insights into tradition and family, love and sex... This is a splendid fictional debut."
—Robert Olen Butler
Poetry; Biography
STARS AT NOON: Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran
Poems that give voice to the mercurial, dazzling woman who first broke the sound barrier.
Poetry
Black Drum
A stunning collection that adroitly mixes the sacred and the profane, the classical and casual.
—Booklist
This Close to the Earth
Moving through the cycle of birth, growth, and death, the poems of Enid Shomer are informed by physical knowledge, transforming it into rare and often startling insight.
Stalking the Florida Panther
"In this fine first book the eternal themes of love, loss, unrequital, and forgiveness come together with the characters to form a remarkably unified whole."
—Maxine Kumin

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