Sharp Stars

Winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for 2009  As she's shown throughout her career, Sharon Bryan is a rare breed of contemporary poet.  A practitioner of acrobatic language that probes matters philosophical and psychological, Bryan is also playful and humorous, and this mixture of attributes reveals itself in each of these tightly-knit, succulent poems. Concerned with the interplay of matter and spirit, Bryan's poems in this collection also address, and sometimes blend, issues of biology, astronomy, and music. As she writes in the poem Big Band Theory: “It all began with music,/ with that much desire to be/ in motion, waves of longing/ with Nothing to pass through,/ the pulsing you feel before/ you hear it. The darkness couldn't/ keep still, it began to sway....” The poems in Sharp Stars represent more than ten years of work. Of her last book, Flying Blind, published in 1996, Small Press wrote: “In Sharon Bryan's most effective poems, word play is a matter of life and death...