Republic of Mercy: Poems

In Sharon Wang’s thrilling and corporeal geometry, touch dominates, if often in its ‘aftermarks’: singes, whiffs, folds of fabric, echoing gestures between bodies. With generous language and quicksilver intelligence, Wang expresses ‘a hunger so large it stops the mouth.’ Her poems describe what is ‘hard and brilliant,’ the spaces between objects, and what’s left in the wake of losses. “Despite its attunement both to elegy and to witness, the mode is praise: ‘He loved the world. He loved it suddenly / and without reason.’ . . . As the poet works to understand, ‘If in fact it wasn’t possible to build / the world anew,’ she does build––extravagantly, judiciously, lovingly. The result is a book of radiant integrity.” — from the judges’ citation for the Kundiman Poetry Prize.