Generation
Sharon Kraus
“In an impressive first book, Generation, Kruas resuscitates elements of poetry that have been flagging in confessionalism; she redefines what it is to take a ‘risk’ as a writer. This is a book in which delicate, intellectualized technique combines with searing self-revelation in a way that is both achingly beautiful and shockingly accessible.”
—Greensburg [Pennsylvania] Tribune
"Sensual, passionate, earthly and unearthly together, Sharon
Kraus’s work brings a fierce grief up into the same daylight of her words. The most
heart-breaking poems in Generation are the childhood poems, but
the others reflect that childhood’s fire: the book is ‘home-made’, and it
has a rare necessity about it, and gallantry."
—Jean Valentine
"These poems are the difficult children of McCarriston’s Eva-Mary
and Olds’s Satan Says. Raw, rangy, incantory creatures who
sing of the dark side of the human family, of survival and what comes after."
—Dorianne Laux
"For most, pain is a feeling one spends effort to prevent or
deny: from the broken leg to the broken promise. But if one is determined to feel deeply,
all emotions must register. In this collection, Sharon Kraus invites us to experience
deeply poems where love is as excruciating as the wound."
—Kimiko Hahn
about the author
Sharon Kraus was born in Chicago
and earned her M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University. Her poems have appeared
in TriQuarterly, Agni, Prairie Schooner, The Mississippi Review, Alaska
Quarterly Review, Southern Poetry Review, Northeast Corridor, and other
journals. She has received the Editor’s Choice Award from Columbia: A
Journal of Literature and Art, a scholarship from the Bread Loaf
Writers’ Conference, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and other awards.
Author photo by Brian Murphy
