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Praise for Lee Sharkey's A Darker, Sweeter String
Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily
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"If our dreams could edit the news (and sometimes our nightmares) these poems are how they’d wake us up to the urgency of our times.”
—Betsy Sholl, Poet Laureate of Maine
“Sharkey honors the accountability of language by turning her ear to the rhythms of the soul’s survival."
—Francine Sterle, author of Nude in Winter
"An important book. . . . one of the best books of the year."
—John Deming, editor, Coldfront Magazine
In this poetry of the moral imagination, Lee Sharkey explores the psychic landscape of cruelty, violence, and war. Her lyric poems draw their imagery from Israel/Palestine, Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq, and small town USA, as well as from the intimate domains of sickness and birth. Sharkey responds to our endangered post-9/11 world with courage and clear-eyed tenderness. In a political climate that threatens sanity, she has composed a music of daring empathy.
More Praise for A Darker, Sweeter String
"Today the war dead failed to make the headlines / to keep myself human I construct a shrine of words." These taut, truth-telling poems teach us how to 'heft . . . more weight than we can carry,' how to speak the unspeakable, 'the grief that scours the heart.' In their concision, the eloquence of their exactitude, they say only what is needful. Silence is their punctuation. And how restorative their respect, 'how beautiful is the gift of mourning.'"
—Eleanor Wilner, author of The Girl with Bees in Her Hair
"If you buy no other book for the next five years, this is a must, must read, must possess."
—Irene Koronas, Wilderness House Literary Review
"Perhaps what is most remarkable in this altogether remarkable writing is that it not only brings back to life but that in doing so ethically, it does so without reassurance."
—Tony Brinkley, Puckerbrush Review
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The suicides
we’re circling the hole where the ones
who abandoned us lie absent electric
we’re pacing a ring in the ground
to contain what they spilled
yet we can’t keep our eyes off its surface
we’re greedy to ladle the crimson porridge
to beat out the krik krak of tin foil and bone
then traitors we shout
take it back for the sake of each morning
you summoned the figments together
for the sake of the baba whose cow fed
all the children until there was none
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