Shadows Trail Them Home is an excellent and compelling novel in poetry, an important contribution to the cultural canon of American life, presented in an engaging but disturbing context. It needs to be read by a wide audience, not only those who have faced abuses as children, as the two main characters have and, consequently, suffer severe (but not disabling) life-long responses, but also by a reading public that treasures poetry that fuses superior writing with major social issues. This penetrating book is compassionated narrated, as it articulates the extent to which the past can never really be overcome, even though one may be bent on altering it.--Ronald Moran, author of The Jane Poems and Waiting