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Karen Elizabeth Sharpe: Prayer Can Be Anything
September 7 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
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
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With lush, vibrant language and a keen and unflinching observation of the world and life, Sharpe’s second collection asks us to shed ourselves of pretense and look at the world through our wounded, vulnerable hearts. Whether considering the natural world around us, or an inner world, these poems ask us to look with a steady eye to the love, hurt, and healing that shape us.
Karen Elizabeth Sharpe is a poetry editor at the Worcester Review, and her poems have appeared in Columbia Journal, West Trade Review, Mom Egg Review, Catalyst, Mason Street Review and other magazines and anthologies. Karen has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has been a coffee-cart clerk, a babysitter, a journalist and editor, a caterer, a funeral ceremonialist, a professional fundraiser, and an assistant vice-president at two universities. She celebrates the healing power of forgiveness in relationships.