Excerpts…

TO MYSELF AT TWENTY

Don’t do it, girl, you’ll
disappear into what you can’t
understand. It’s just one
page, this tiny unlived
life you’re stepping into.
Still no one’s mother, you
haven’t yet loved too
much, you don’t know
the art of sorrow. Who
you might have been
doesn’t haunt, the necklace
that almost strangled is
still in the box. There’s
purity in this aloneness.
Pay the entrance fee
before your scream
is screamed, while
your son’s death only
exists in your husband’s
dream. Nancy’s daughter
will never have to ask
if you’ll be happy again.
Send in a replacement.
back away fast. Hurry,
girl, it’s what you don’t
do that saves you.

Praise...

The poems in Unhinged open wide the doors between love and loss, past and present, life and death. Charde teaches us that to study any subject is to reckon with its opposite: how she can choose the commitment of marriage, while wanting “to keep moving”; how she honors the loss of her son, a grief that still shouts “like the emperor peonies/ burning red in [her] garden,” while also wanting “to lasso [her] life to a more merciful anchor”; how she faces her own mortality, thanking death for giving her “singularity, a kind of dignity” exactly when she is “learning to love the fire” of life. Charde’s honesty is disarming: here, grief is not melodramatic but intimate—these poems teach us that to let grief open us we must let it lead us beyond what's static, standard, or finite. Only then can we claim the hard-earned understanding that “the life [we] have is/ the one worth living in.”

Katy Didden
The Glacier's Wake

Sharon Charde’s “Unhinged” is electric in its searing craft of truth telling. Here, Charde’s extraordinary voice is sharp, vulnerable, terrifying and nuanced. These poems resist passivity at each broken breaking of line, inherently demanding something from life far more profound than answers. “Unhinged” is a force of hard work and harder love. Charde writes, “Costumed/as adults, we continued our fictions, until/we couldn’t. Out here now on the fringes/of the end, I’m too tired to pretend.” In these raw poems, we recognize ourselves again as Charde writes of marriage, motherhood, youth, grief, nature, identity, poetry, age, pleasure, and pain. We are reminded of what is at stake for each of us when Charde declares, “I want my colors back.”

Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Lighting The Shadow, Mule And Pear, Miracle Arrhythmia, The Requited Distance

Unhinged is a study in sorrow. Filaments of loss are threaded through each poem even as the poems sing their grief, releasing it into the world so it doesn’t strangle. In this work of mourning and clarity, Charde shifts elegantly between song and wreckage to find that sometimes “it’s what you don’t do that saves you.” And, though these poems are shadowed by catacombs, a collapsed mulberry tree, and a dead son’s clothes, they remind us to “be kind, while there is still time.”

Simone Muench
Wolf Cento, Lampblack And Ash, Orange Crush