What’s After Making Love traverses a woman’s life from childhood to maturity with stops along the way for grief over a son’s death, conflicted emotions over a mother’s death, long love for a husband, betrayals of that love and realistic assessments of women’s traditional roles and the complications they present for achieving full personhood. Motherhood and marriage are strong thematic components of the collection, and the title’s question leads to a ruminative exploration of all the many possible answers that fall under its umbrella.
In this meditative, exquisite collection, poet Sharon Charde mines the depths of private grief to show how such experiences lend a kind of clarity to daily living. In What’s After Making Love Charde offers a survey, an inventory of a life, with notions both practical and metaphysical: marriage, ticket stubs, beetles on a rosebush, the loss of a mother and a son. We are more than these things, Charde tells us, but only if we allow ourselves to be held in our sadness. That is the hard work of living, made lighter by the magic of a book like this.
Alison Powell, author of Boats in the Attic and The Art of Perpetuation
In these urgent poems, Sharon Charde grapples with the complex realities of a long life, the devastating death of a son, and the questions that arise from a restless intelligence trying to make sense of her often conflicting desires. The language of that search is intensely alive, the imagery haunting, and the grace that can be achieved is hard won. “What’s after / making love?” A deeply moving portrait of one survivor, which has profound lessons for us all.
Kathryn Levy, author of Reports and Losing the Moon
In this collection of poems rich with metaphors of hunger and desire, Sharon Charde renders the ache of not living up to her parents’ American Dream, the devastation upon losing a child, and the search for self within the bonds of long marriage. We feel at one with her when, dropping sticky rice into a monk’s begging bowl, we realize that “the ordinary pie life gives” can provide enough sustenance after all.
Kathryn Jordan, author of Riding Waves
Fierce love, piercing grief, and the lyricism of resilience thread through Sharon Charde’s memorable What’s After Making Love, a book of poems that thrums with the truth behind family, landscape, and memory. “I bartered for this jagged, glossy liberty,” says the speaker of Charde’s poems, which sparkle with a wise and unforgettable voice. What does it mean to have “asked too many questions?” And also to unearth the roots of this asking? “I’m from all those questions and some of the answers,” Charde’s speaker reveals in poems that question authority while mothering, grieving, loving, and facing the present and what’s to come. What’s After Making Love locates renewal in language that sings, even though “The world is breaking / and I’m breaking with it.”
Tyler Mills, author of The Bomb Cloud and Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets
Sharon Charde
practiced family therapy for twenty-five years as a licensed professional counselor and has led writing groups for women since 1992. She has won numerous poetry awards, has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, and has been nominated ten times for the Pushcart award.
The BBC adapted her work for an hour-long radio broadcast in June 2012, and she has seven published collections of poetry, the latest in September 2021, The Glass is Already Broken, from Blue Light Press. Charde has been awarded fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, MacDowell, Ucross Foundation and The Corporation of Yaddo. She lives in Lakeville, Connecticut, with her husband, John.