Lee Sharkey is the author of To A Vanished World, a poem sequence in response to Roman Vishniac's photographs of Eastern European Jewry in the years just preceding the Nazi Holocaust. Her poems and translations from the Russian have appeared in Cream City Review, The Fiddlehead, Green Mountains Review, Nimrod, Permafrost, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, The Pinch, Southern Humanities Review, and other literary journals. She lives in the woods outside of Farmington, Maine, where she co-edits the Beloit Poetry Journal and stands in a weekly peace vigil with Women in Black.

Books by Lee Sharkey: A Darker, Sweeter String, To a Vanished World, Long Night Ahead, Pig, and other portions, it was hard to close your eyes on the moonbath

Other poems on the web by Lee Sharkey:
"Injunctions"
"How I Died"

About A Darker, Sweeter String:

"If our dreams could edit the news (and sometimes our nightmares) these poems are how they’d wake us up to the urgency of our times."
—Betsy Sholl

"Sharkey honors the accountability of language by turning her ear to the rhythms of the soul’s survival."
—Francine Sterle

"'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