Dog or Wolf, Nine Mile Press, 2022

One Reviewer wrote: In December, I’m always struck by the sky through the tree trunks on the southwestern hills. It’s the only time I feel I really savor the light fully, when the simplicity of it and brevity is most obvious. I had that sense when reading Bill Schulz’s “Dog or Wolf” the ominous ambiguity of the title and the poem within warns you or should, to beware. I got the sense of a great storm that had swept from one coast of America to the other, leaving the continent like the bottom of a dried river, sand and sediment smoothing the jagged edges, loss of many big things, but now wind carved, softened, more human, less distracted. Mostly the poems are set on the edges of water, the sky, the forests with their flowers, trees and birds. There is threaded along the way, the meditations of a penitent. There is a muscular Americanism as counterweight to the ethereal clouds that overhang the earthy spiritual messages in this book, like in the poem “On Blackstrap Road” where the poet takes us on a ride “listening to Hank Williams” recounting briefly, succinctly, the deaths of Hank, the poet’s own father and several friends, leaving us in what I can only describe as cinematic silence.