Before Isadore

by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick

"Shannon Hardwick's Before Isadore gives insight into the softest spaces and the harshest regrets, creating a book 'birth-sick' with its own existence. These poems are a waking dream, a dream of lovers and rivers and piles of bones. Hardwick creates a mythos of life and love inseparable from death, asking her readers to ask where the border lies between hope and suffering, if it really exists at all. Hardwick's invitation is also a prayer 'about touching / the untouched again.'"
-Amy King, author of The Missing Museum and I Want to Make You Safe

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published July 18, 2017

About the author

Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in Salt Hill, Stirring, Versal, The Texas Observer, Devil's Lake, and Four Way Review, among others. She contributed both poetry and prose to A Shadow Map: An Anthology of Survivors of Sexual Assault. Hardwick also serves as the poetry editor for The Boiler Journal.

Reviews

[Letitia Trent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shannon Elizabeth's Hardwick's Before Isadore is a lush, lyrical, and mystical collection that is ~about~ so many things--relationships, the body, birth, sadness, love--but the these ideas are all seen through a mystical, elevated eye, one that makes everything feel heightened, that makes you see things new again.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems about life, death, birth, loss, and hope.

from Myself a Shelter: "I am a body not my own like the man / who, carrying wood, restored windows / for me. I can't make myself a shelter."

from How a Home is Made: "How it felt / as if their hearts, finally free, caught / the wind so fast riding into pain / to conquer it."

from I Wrote About it Once, But: "it was a moment I wanted to / relive—a wound on the tongue / or thrill of almost drowning, / the gasp."