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About The Narrator
Sharon Foley's poems have received recognition and awards from the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and she has two published collections: What is Endured and Drunk With Illumination.
She lives in Whitefish Bay Wisconsin with her husband, children, and ferocious five-pound Morkie, Dash.
Books By Sharon Foley
What is Endured
Dr. Sharon Foley’s poems illuminate the complexity of emotions surrounding illness, death and loss. Her experience as a physician gives her a unique perspective from which to shine that light, allowing insight into life’s most personal and powerful moments, she witnesses cancer’s slow ravage, “each day your stomach collapsed/further into itself/ and you went with it/folding into the seam of your bed”; pronounces a patient’s death, “I felt something I never had before/it was like the rumbling of an approaching train/rushing faster, whistling louder”; describes cardiac surgery; “I saw inside/the house of your ribs.” Sharon Foley’s award winning poems invites us to experience her unforgettable encounters with illness and mortality; universal hardships that touch all of us.
Paper Back $4.30
Drunk With Illumination
Emotionally stirring, sensory charged, in Sharon Foley’s second collection of poems, Drunk with Illumination, she expertly transmutes life experiences and distills them into a poetry that reignites the senses. Her poems often revolve around natural themes, as in attempting to describe a sunrise; “I have no name/for this feeling that swells/ when I watch the unfolding dawn/of an ordinary day;” or hiking a mountain trail; “safe beneath the stretching sky/ blue cape of the world;” or driving Nebraska back roads; “where marshland opens up/like an ironed seam.” But themes of sorrow are also examined as she faces the loss of a young friend; “we thought our lives stretched-out-long ahead/like highway sixty-nine;” or a troubled brother; “I want to crack the egg/pull you out of your shell/trim your long beard of disappointment.” And finally, themes of aging are explored; “it’s much simpler than I ever knew/this trouble/ of time running out . . . I will grow close to the wheat/and the wheat will grow close to me/and I will lie down/let go.” Sharon Foley’s poems bravely ‘illuminate’ universal themes of life.
Paper Back $11.99