Description
“Sharon Carter's poems reveal an astonishing sensibility, a voice that probes the
intimate life of the body —personal, cultural, history itself— with the exactness
of a scalpel. The heart stutters on, she tells us, and she would know. As a physician,
she became attuned to the crack and groan of the human body: illness and death
rising like birdsong from the throat; women in labor; fissures on an iced-over
lake like the blight of a mammogram. Her meditations are nuanced, droll, clear
sighted; alert to the marvels of the earth and its ruin; layered with bravado, bees,
and longing. Women do this, she affirms: deliver babies, make poems, resurrect the
dead. I find myself standing back with admiration. ‘May light from the farthest
galaxy/arrive before too long,’ she writes. Amen.” —KATHRYN HUNT, author of
Long Way Through Ruin
“Sharon Carter's poems honor the fragility of our flesh, our bones and our psyches.
Whether about treating a young boy's infected finger (‘A red line reaches for his
armpit/For his life’) or considering blame (‘On winter nights when coyotes sob/
among the pines/and the moon never rises’), about a loss in pregnancy (‘How
to be grateful for what is/than struggle over what never was’), or footsteps (‘our
footsteps clatter in couplets’), they are masterfully astute and, above all, honest.
Sharon Carter's collection displays the feat of a fine poet who meets one's life on its
own terms and reaches in to evoke the universal human experience.” —SHEILA BENDER, author of
A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief
Poetry.