Book epigraph "QUIVER", by Gerard De Nerval: "Look around you, everything quivers with being."
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 a "Long Way Through Ruin" and "Seed Wheel"
These spiky but tender poems grow from a complex root system slowly exposed as we read them. Describing the terror of a difficult childbirth, or commenting on a corrupt culture--tell me, when has money made anyone honest? -Carter uses myth and emotion to wrap us in a vine of beauty, memory, and brutal decay. Common flowers and vegetation become metaphors for larger concerns and expand our world exponentially. -GAYLE KAUNE, author of "All the Birds Awake" and "Noise from Stars"