What’s After Making Love traverses a woman’s life from childhood to maturity with stops along the way for grief over a son’s death, conflicted emotions over a mother’s death, long love for a husband, betrayals of that love and realistic assessments of women’s traditional roles and the complications they present for achieving full personhood. Motherhood and marriage are strong thematic components of the collection, and the title’s question leads to a ruminative exploration of all the many possible answers that fall under its umbrella.

In this meditative, exquisite collection, poet Sharon Charde mines the depths of private grief to show how such experiences lend a kind of clarity to daily living. In What’s After Making Love Charde offers a survey, an inventory of a life, with notions both practical and metaphysical: marriage, ticket stubs, beetles on a rosebush, the loss of a mother and a son. We are more than these things, Charde tells us, but only if we allow ourselves to be held in our sadness. That is the hard work of living, made lighter by the magic of a book like this.

Alison Powell, author of Boats in the Attic and The Art of Perpetuation

In these urgent poems, Sharon Charde grapples with the complex realities of a long life, the devastating death of a son, and the questions that arise from a restless intelligence trying to make sense of her often conflicting desires. The language of that search is intensely alive, the imagery haunting, and the grace that can be achieved is hard won. “What’s after / making love?” A deeply moving portrait of one survivor, which has profound lessons for us all.

Kathryn Levy, author of Reports and Losing the Moon