Sharon Fagan McDermott is a poet, musician, and a teacher ofliterature at a private school in Pittsburgh. She has published three chapbook collections, Voluptuous, Alley Scatting (Parallel Press, 2005), and most recently, Bitter Acoustic, winner of the 2011 Jacar Press Chapbook competition, chosen by poet Betty Adcock. Her poems have been published widely in journals including Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and Seneca Review, as well as in anthologies, including A Fine Excess (Sarabande Press) and Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State University Press.) McDermott has been a recipient of both a Pittsburgh Foundation Award and a PA Council on the Arts grant.

Books by Sharon Fagan McDermott:

Other poems on the web by Sharon Fagan McDermott:
Four poems
"Icicle Suite"
"Room in Brooklyn 1932"
"Summer Prayer — Pennsylvania"
"Longitude"
"Against Unraveling"

Sharon Fagan McDermott on Twitter.

About Life Without Furniture:

"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