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

About the Author

Sharon Charde has six published poetry collections, taught incarcerated girls poetry for sixteen years, and wrote a memoir about that work, I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent, published by Mango in June 2020. She has received many awards for her poetry, seven Pushcart nominations and numerous fellowships, among them Yaddo, Ucross and MacDowell. A retired psychotherapist, she lives in Northwest Connecticut with her husband of fifty-seven years.