Excerpt…

INCANDESCENCE

I’ve failed to die again, uncured of desire
or vanity, despite throngs of wrong
directions. The via dolorosa a dead-end
street, I’ve turned around, taken a left,
then another, now a right. My husband
always says if you want to be found, stay
where you are, but I keep going, only
just learning how not to save love but
to spend it. I’ll tell you a story with my body
if you listen. There’s a Romanian proverb
that says the tree won’t grow if you don’t
pick the apples. A woman in the next room
hums a song from the sixties, I want
her to come in and eat the fruit, tell me,
whether our souls are thick or thin. I’ll
show her my bruises, the beautiful
light at both ends of the candle.

Praise...

Sharon Charde’s poems are molten, fierce and ruminative. Now with the publication of Incendiary, I’m greedily grateful for all of us that these hot, heartbroken and wise lyrics are increasingly in the world.

Eileen Myles
author of Inferno, Snowflake/different streets, Sorry, Tree

The poems in Incendiary evoke deep passion and rage, loss and the vagaries of love in almost equal measure. At play, undercurrent, is a wonderful incantatory voice, almost a prayer, at times savage or vulnerable, offset by a savvy, wild humor only a girl educated by nuns could render so seemingly effortlessly.

Jan Conn
author of Edge Effects and Botero’s Beautiful Horses

Like ticket stubs from the “museum of incineration,” poems in Sharon Charde’s Incendiary burn; here are talismanic transmissions of a poet engaged in navigating “real work” of aftermath, rising from ashes – of loss, love, lust, and longing: you know, “just ordinary agony,” in the day-to-day of a woman tempered into comprehension. Charde is master of the conciliatory-imperative, as she charts her way through a thicket of grief and desire. Hasn’t she “made sufficient payment?” these poems ask: “I’ve failed to die again,” and yet, it’s precisely this simmering crucible of implosion that lets these lyrics burn. “Come and see it,” Charde demands; do!

Katrina Roberts
author of Underdog, The Quick, and Friendly Fire.

Arcadia Magazine, 2014 Winner 2014 Ruby Irene Poetry Chapbook Contest
Copies available from Sharon Charde ($10 per copy + $1 postage) sharoncharde@gmail.com