Unhinged

by Sharon Charde

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 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 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. Sharon Charde is not only a poet. A family therapist, a former shaman-in-training, a volunteer writing teacher to delinquent girls in a residential treatment facility, a minimally competent carpenter and devoted yoga practitioner, she is a veteran of fifty-five years of marriage to the same man. Her life as wife, mother and grandmother informs her poems as well as a memoir that will come out next year. She has been published widely in literary journals, including Poet Lore, Upstreet, Rattle, Calyx and Ping Pong, and has one full-length poetry collection, Branch In His Hand, as well as four prize-winning chapbooks and many award-winning poems. Four Trees From Ponte Sisto , an hour-long radio drama shaped from her poems was broadcast by the BBC in 2012. She currently continues to teach the women's writing retreats she developed twenty-five years ago and has been leading ever since. Charde has been awarded fellowships to The Corporation Of Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center For The Creative Arts and Vermont Studio Center.

34 pages, Paperback

Published June 22, 2019

About the author

Sharon Charde, a retired psychotherapist and a writing teacher since 1992, has won numerous poetry awards, the latest being 2018 finalist in the Blue Light Press chapbook contest for Unhinged, published in 2019, Sixty Four Best Poets of 2018 by The Halcyone, and a semi-finalist in the 2019 Grid contest for full-length collections for The Glass Is Already Broken. She is published over eighty times in journals and anthologies of poetry and prose, including Calyx, Mudfish, The Paterson Review, Ping Pong, Rattle, Poet Lore, Upstreet and The Comstock Review, and has had seven Pushcart nominations. She has also edited and published I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, containing the work of the adjudicated teenaged females she has volunteered with since 1999 at a residential treatment center in Litchfield Ct. She has three first prize-winning chapbooks, Bad Girl At The Altar Rail, Four Trees Down From Ponte Sisto and Incendiary as well as a full-length collection, Branch In His Hand, published by Backwaters Press in November 2008, which was adapted as a radio play by the BBC, broadcast in 2012. After Blue, for which she won honorable mention in Finishing Line Press’s 2013 chapbook contest, was published in September 2014. She has been awarded fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center For The Creative Arts, The MacDowell Colony, The UCross Foundation and The Corporation Of Yaddo. Her memoir, also titled, I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, How Poetry Changed a Group of At-Risk Young Women, will be published by Mango Publishing, in June 2020.