Instructions in My Absence Poems

With precise diction and syntax, Sharon Alexander escorts readers on a journey through her complex psyche filled with conflict and wistful observation. Through an ability to observe her world accurately, Alexander clarifies a vision that explores childhood and adolescence to blend them gracefully into a mature sensibility. Alexander's language is inventive and symbolic: "His flesh / a secret architecture / etched in ink" and "my body / a ticking wire / anchored to the belly / of the world," a language that stimulates imagination through an invocation of the senses, plus a sensitivity to a musical lexicon that creates a vision the reader can experience as though gazing through an opened window directly into the poet's inner being: "Crows clutter the sky, / wings rattle my windows - the horizon crooked as a broken bone" and "I heard a sizzle as the plastic pool chair / melts and oozes like grilled cheese, / the burnt smell clinging to our clothes." A highly enjoyable book, Instructions in My Absence is written by a cultivated sensibility allowing poet and reader to stroll hand in hand through its pages as naturally as "the basil I pinched from the pot on the porch / so pungent my fingers were fragrant long after we were gone." - Alan Britt, Final Judge