A Darker, Sweeter String

In these poems of the moral imagination, Lee Sharkey explores the disfigured psychic landscape of cruelty, violence, and war. Her lyric poems chart a geography that draws its imagery from Israel and 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 environment that threatens sanity, she has composed a music of daring empathy.

Lee Sharkey is the author of To A Vanished World, a poem sequence in response to Roman Vishniac's photographs of Eastern European Jewry in the years just preceding the Nazi Holocaust. Her poems and translations from the Russian have appeared in Cream City Review, The Fiddlehead, Green Mountains Review, Margie, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, The Pinch, Southern Humanities Review, and other literary journals.