Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick has chapbooks out with Thrush Press and Mouthfeel Press. Her work has appeared in Salt Hill, Stirring, Versal, The Texas Observer, Devil's Lake, Four Way Review, among others. She is listed as a contributor of both poetry and prose in A Shadow Map: An Anthology of Survivors of Sexual Assualt published by Civil Coping Mechanisms. Hardwick serves as the poetry editor for The Boiler Journal. This is her first full-length book of poetry.

Books by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick:

Other poems on the web by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick:
Five poems
Three poems
Three poems
Two poems
Three poems
"Francine Avoids Blood Oranges for the Sound They Make Inside Her"
Two poems
Three poems
Two poems
"Kitchen Reacher Morning"
Two poems
"The Brain Like An Orchestra That Can Play Many Tunes"
"How I Am Not Like Donald Trump"
Five poems
"The One Who Broke"
Two poems
"Book of Gaigemon, II"
" I'm All Over the Place. I'm in a New Thing."

About Before Isadore:

"Shannon Hardwick's Before Isadore gives insight into the softest spaces and the harshest regrets, creating a book 'birth-sick' with its own existence. These poems are a waking dream, a dream of lovers and rivers and piles of bones. Hardwick creates a mythos of life and love inseparable from death, asking her readers to ask where the border lies between hope and suffering, if it really exists at all. Hardwick's invitation is also a prayer 'about touching / the untouched again.'"
—Amy King

"Written inside a runnel of a life, these poems work both as offering and birthing, and spell out the coming-to-be of Isadore, along with the dissolution of a marriage-- in the poet-mother's lively inventive and surreal poems. There is a mix of god talk 'sounds/only a god knows/exists' and 'guilt, glitter and grace.' In such an intelligent book, the poems beckon us to stop and read again 'wonder's first' words, so that we 'stretch inside circles,' and so that a newborn, 'blue lipped/ in the last prayer' is brought forth both in form and in fancy. The middle section a series of poems describing how parts of the body, marriage and child were made, as in 'ear is made/into the absence,' is evocative and inventive. The arc of the book's poems work wonderfully, ending then with 'the one who broke/into a person who prays.'"
—Veronica Golos

"Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick is a remarkable writer. Breathtakingly intimate, riotously magical, by turns harrowing and majestic, Before Isadore is a work of astonishing power. A true triumph."
—Musa Okwonga