Excerpt…

HUNGRY

I’m the most beautiful woman in the world. I can get
the ring to go back into the bell, the rose return

to the bud, the wrinkled skin to smooth out. I am holy
mary mother of god, I wash your moment clean of need

and grasp. I can do anything you want, get you to tap
dance, paint your face with glitter whorls, blow up

balloons for the party of us. I’m a rock concert, I play
so loud you have to hear me. Listen. I’m extravagant,

your girl in a string bikini that can fit in a thimble,
an adventure you’re dying to have, your lucky charm.

I’m a sorcerer, spinning god like a hula hoop, crazed
by the piece of moon you left. Wait, wait, don’t leave

the party yet, I have music, a fat cigar, a bottle of good
champagne, a feather boa. Stay, make another soundtrack

with me, kill the echo of that old adagio, ripe and burning.

Praise...

This collection of poems is the best I have ever read about the loss of a love that one cannot let go. It takes my breath away, and I cannot tell why without being a spoiler. Let me simply say it goes to the heart of God, as well as to the depths of human love. After Blue is a requiem. In exquisite language we are given again what we have known: In the dark dining room of loss/ rests a plate, a napkin unfolds. But Charde takes us into a story as profound as a good novel: We collected each other then, shocked/ lambs of God, unsafe as any holy thing. Expect to be surprised. Expect to be changed.

Pat Schneider
Another River, How The Light Gets In, Writing Alone and With Others

Sharon Charde creates the enchantment, the longing, the joy and the heartbreak of a compelling love affair. From the opening lines (later I will think of her blue sweater—the small wooden buttons down the front) we’re brought into the intimacy of this haunting relationship through a wealth of vivid details and an open heart. AFTER BLUE is a love story, an elegy, a prayer.

Ellen Bass
The Human Line, The Mules Of Love, Like A Beggar

Every now and then a book of such exquisite sorrow appears that each word, in context, throbs like a bruise you love to touch. H.D.’s End to Torment is such a book; Linda Gregg’s Chosen by the Lion is another. Now Sharon Charde has given us, in After Blue, a sequence that means to chart “hunger’s map” and to describe, if possible, “the color of what was.” As masterful in the telling as she is in the withholding, Charde makes her loss beautiful and devastating and holy.

Michael Waters
Darling Vulgarity, Gospel Night, editor Contemporary American Poetry