More Praise for A Darker, Sweeter String

"Today the war dead failed to make the headlines / to keep myself human I construct a shrine of words." These taut, truth-telling poems teach us how to 'heft . . . more weight than we can carry,' how to speak the unspeakable, 'the grief that scours the heart.' In their concision, the eloquence of their exactitude, they say only what is needful. Silence is their punctuation. And how restorative their respect, 'how beautiful is the gift of mourning.'"
                                                                —Eleanor Wilner, author of The Girl with Bees in Her Hair

"Echoing Carolyn Forché's poetry of witness, the poems in Lee Sharkey’s A Darker, Sweeter String are imbued with a yearning for peace, and while war in its many faces is omnipresent in these beautifully wrought poems, so also is the sense of hope. . . . A Darker, Sweeter String, a collection that embodies the spirit that we can resolve what rends us, is a must read."
                                                               —Edythe Haendel Schwartz, Calyx Journal