The Glass Is Already Broken
In The Glass is Already Broken, a mother navigates the decades-old loss of her son: “I keep trying to feel who I was before you / died. Listen to music I listened to then, Beatles, / The Band, Rolling Stones,” she insists, before admitting "I can’t / put the snake’s skin back around its flesh, / the snow back into the sky.” But what she can do is its own wonder: she shatters open a life centered on marriage and motherhood to reclaim her primal identity underneath. She revisits her choices. These poems grieve but they also reckon, bargain, riddle and joke, lust and croon, with every mode accented by a fine-hewed lineation. Reading these poems, and re-reading them, wrecked me in the best possible way.
—Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode
Over 25 years Sharon Charde's poems have considered, meditated upon, re-enacted, imagined and mourned one catastrophic death. Here is the culmination - crystalline, luminous, enraged, triumphant and loving - of that transformative work.
—Honor Moore, author of OUR REVOLUTION
The Glass Is Already Broken is a stunning collection of poems. Its center of gravity is grief--a weight and mass so dense that one cannot escape the force of its pull. The poems possess exceptional subtlety and lyric grace as they reinterrogate their narrative of loss: each retelling, each reiteration whittled to the perfection. From the first poem to the last, Sharon Charde offers us a collection of harrowing, breathtaking elegiac beauty.
—Eric Pankey