Sharon Israel’s poems are full of song and detail, movement and color, the pleasures she brings to the page are many and varied. We are as likely to find Israel’s speaker sighting owls in the Catskills, or helping in her dad’s butcher shop, as in the world of music implied by the title. In Voice Lesson, Israel’s urge is alchemical, so that when she’s behind the counter, “scoop{ing} shiny brains into plastic bags” she is also arranging them “carefully like pale jewels.” She’s after a kind of transformation, and urgesus, “Always make room/for that singing thing/inside you.” - Daisy Fried, author of Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice
This is a powerful, intelligent work by a poet who knows how to share and sing her feelings. Not afraid of intimacy, Sharon catches light in the darkness in these 22 poems with a fresh voice that will entice the reader to return to this book for her authentic displays of gratitude and tenderness. The poems are a mixture of what is sacred, what needs to be remembered, music in the day-to-dayness of our lives. She has the ability to receive even the world’s sensuality – “basso/mountain chords-ocean’s /salt and sweet palate/ of rives and lakes, island keys under chromatic/skies turned major or minor…” while honoring and celebrating a connection to family “Whipped by the wind on the mountain/I look to my son, breathein and sing.” - Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, author of I WANT TO THANK MY EYES
Sharon Israel’s “Type Triple A” is a poetic Mobius strip whose title, meaning,, and sound all curve back on each other to create a beautiful effect. - Ken S, Editor, SPANK the CARP (www.spankthecarp.com)
Voice Lesson is an exceptional debut by Sharon Israel, a gifted poet with profound verbal and musical skills. The apt prescript by Walt Whitman is followed on the next page by the line “I shout my schedule electric,” which the entire book does, from the Elvis Presley imagism of “Stuck on You” to the remarkable energy of “The Hive” to the memorable “Melodrama at the Biograph,” in which John Dillinger is frozen in time yet still moves, a poem so taut with drama you will never forgetit. Indeed the reader will never forget any of these poems. The incantatory power of lines like “we sigh/we chant/we merge/we stay,” and that in many other lines, will be with us permanently. Like Whitman before her, Sharon Israel “breathes in and sings” with a breathtaking insight that sees inside surfaces and opens up worlds.” - Lee Slonimsky, author of Consulting with the Swifts: New and Selected Poems 1982-2015
Purchase Voice Lesson
https://www.posttraumaticpress.com/titles/voice-lesson
Poems from Voice Lesson
"Pie Bird"
http://www.sprylit.com/archives/issue-07/poetry/pie-bird
"Fernand"
https://med-lit.vcu.edu/media/med-lit/docs/MLM3.1Fall2015.pdf (Fall 2015, p. 14)
"Melodrama at the Biograph"
https://poemsoncrime.blogspot.com/2015/11/sharon-israel.html
