Join Porter Square Books for a memorial reading from Lee Sharkey’s just-published collection of poetry, I Will Not Name It Except to Say (Tupelo). Poems from the book, which was compiled in the final weeks of Sharkey’s life, will be read by local poets Martha Collins, Denise Bergman, and Fred Marchant. This event is free and open to all, hosted on Crowdcast.

I Will Not Name It Except to Say, which the late Lee Sharkey compiled in the weeks following a cancer diagnosis in August 2020, is a luminous exploration of grief in its many dimensions. The book moves from personal grief into history, responding to the art of Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak and German expressionists whose art recorded the disasters and hopes of World War I. One major poem honors the contemporary painter May Stevens, placing her work in dialogue with German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg; others explore contemporary experiences of war and violence. Circling back to the personal but carrying the weight of all that has gone before, the final section of the book culminates in poems that ask deep questions of an Old Testament God. If Sharkey herself provides no answers, she gives us these fierce and tender poems. “We read, we write, we do language,” she says; “That is how, a mentor tells me, civilizations heal.”

Hadara Bar-Nadav has said: “I am wonderstruck by the gorgeous, kaleidoscopic sprawl of Lee Sharkey’s I Will Not Name It Except to Say. Furious urgency burns from these masterful poems. . . . With formal innovation and an ear tuned to god, her poems rise between sky and dirt, ever merciless, piercing, beautiful. Sharkey’s new book is, in her own words, ‘wild, erratic,’ and also spellbound, heartbound, bristling with humanity and love.”

Lee Sharkey is the author of Walking Backwards (Tupelo, 2016), Calendars of Fire (Tupelo, 2013), and five earlier books of poems, as well as a number of chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including Consequence, FIELD, Kenyon Review, and Tikkun, and has received many awards, including the 2017 Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize and the 2018 Maine Literary Award in Poetry. She served for fifteen years as co-editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal.

Denise Bergman is the author of The Shape of the Keyhole (Black Lawrence, 2020) and four earlier collections of poems. She lives in Cambridge.

Martha Collins is the author of Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019) and nine earlier collections of poems. She lives in Cambridge.

Fred Marchant is the author of Said Not Said (Graywolf, 2017) and four earlier collections of poems.. He lives in Arlington.

I Will Not Name It Except to Say: A Memorial Reading for Lee Sharkey