Tupelo Press 2013 Winter Spring Catalog L8x10 USE THIS

Calendars of Fire
Poems by Lee Sharkey
Calendars of Fire is an extended elegy whose grief is political as well as personal. Across barriers of tribe, history, and
mortality, these poems carry us home with their music to a dwelling place in our own resonant bodies.
“An exemplary poetry of conscience that exposes and refutes that ‘the warden is also the historian.’ … Reading Calendars
of Fire, you will know what it means to ‘shiver from the we in tenderness.’” — Fady Joudah
“Sharkey takes on the work, simultaneously elegiac and urgent, of reading ‘what has happened back to happening.’
… From line to starting line, she evokes the sufferings of persons affected by war and other oppressions.” — Martha Collins
“When you finish reading Calendars of Fire the first time, you will want to go right back to the beginning and start reading
it again, and again, and each time it will renew itself in its own flames.” — Fred Marchant
Calendars of Fire
Lee Sharkey
$16.95 paper, ISBN 978-1-936797-26-4
March 2013
With birds on his shoulders
He becomes the mind that will enact it
the wound traveling in a widening orbit
the will to keep silent that needs to speak
The future arrives—not in the motifs
of songbirds but in the falling off
from notes to intervals
Violation rises like a planet
its own sound something quiet
like sliding bodies into water
Al Bersbach
Lee Sharkey
is the author of six chapbooks and three previous
full-length collections of poems, most recently
A Darker, Sweeter String (Off the Grid Press, 2008).
She was the Maine Arts Commission’s 2010
Fellow in Literary Arts and recipient of the 1997
Rainmaker Award in Poetry, chosen by Carolyn
Forché. Since 2003, she has co-edited the Beloit
Poetry Journal, one of the country’s oldest literary
magazines.
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