Prayer Can Be Anything by Karen Elizabeth Sharpe

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It’s said poems are prayers. These poems are mile markers in a life that finds faith in poetry.

–Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country

Karen Elizabeth Sharpe’s poetry collection, Prayer Can Be Anything, gorgeously shakes the reader into one “dream-soaked awakening” after another. The natural world, world of bright- flashing birds and frozen-over wood frogs, world of fields “lit with daisies” is brought to vivid life by Sharpe’s deft, inventive use of language and her sure hand with imagery. But the world of this book is also shadowed with violence and loss as the speaker performs the difficult task of commemorating an imperfect and early-dead father and of coming to terms with the wounds that painfully shaped her own life. At once aching elegy and forthright reckoning, Prayer Can Be Anything is proof of the exponential power in the telling of one woman’s truth.

–Francesca Bell, author of Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems by Max Sessner, What Small Sound and Bright Stain

Reading this book is like being served an incredible new wine—something complex and many layered, something heady and transporting. With each sip, I want more. I love the language of these poems, the dark inner music, the ache in the details, the unwritten hope that somehow shines through. There’s a nakedness here that tugs at our own naked hearts. These poems demand we read them with as much courage and vulnerability as it took to write them. I celebrate Karen Elizabeth Sharpe’s authenticity and talent. This collection is a triumph of the heart—no matter how battered, a paean to resilience, a testament to honesty, a prayer for real love.

–Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of All the Honey and Hush

Karen Elizabeth Sharpe confronts grief and addiction in this collection that “hammers a hole big as a fist in my heart.” Prayer Can Be Anything gives voice before the “voice went bankrupt.” As a teen who lost her father and is rendered “weird as a broken moon,” Sharpe confronts hunger in all its “Devil’s cruel food cruel” forms: assault, addiction, grief. Sharpe recounts the journey from the family of origin to the family through marriage, “chewing the way an addict/follows a familiar route of loneliness.” I was consistently amazed by Sharpe’s bravery and her mastery of words. When I read, “I songed her silent wantings. . .I liquored the drink of her heat. . . ,” I was hooked. As a person in recovery, I will return to Karen Elizabeth Sharpe’s Prayer Can Be Anything again and again for its truth and its beauty, for “the golden sunlight forgiving and going on forever. . . .”

–Jennifer Martelli, author of The Queen of Queens and All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes

This Late Afternoon by Karen Elizabeth Sharpe

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