Sharon Fagan McDermott
“In Life Without Furniture ‘the whole visible world flows through one white birch.’ Sharon Fagan McDermott inhabits the spaces between the common and the uncommon: the rich landscapes between ‘A State of Un-Union’ and ‘Driving Home After Singing at Club Café,’ the ineffable sensations between ‘The Geography of Solitude’ and ‘The Hymn of Constellations.’ Even the poems’ titles signal the many resonances of Life Without Furniture. The whole world, visible and invisible, inhabits this wonderful new book.”
Terrance Hayes
“Sharon Fagan McDermott’s Life Without Furniture is remarkable for the generosity of its attention and the precision with which its renders the objects of that attention. ‘What I Won’t Tell Myself’ begins by noticing how ‘the moon salts the sky with stars’ and then brings that gaze indoors, to where a ‘young dog twitches a dream / against my calf.’ These poems move through interior and exterior landscapes, between elegy and praise song. Through such keen observation, the ordinary is uplifted, the way that, in ‘Summer Prayer: Pennsylvania,’ the ‘beloved dead’ ‘console us with such luminous days / that we remember them all over again.'”
Nancy Reddy
ISBN 978-0-936481-25-8