Middle Creek
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Sharon Corcoran's second collection, The Two Worlds, takes us through poems that straddle both worlds, the inner territory and the outer landscape . . .

The Two Worlds offers instructions, meditations, prayers, laments, ceremonies, and praise. Corcoran’s calm voice guides us, gesturing to what might otherwise fail to snag our attention. Lessons are drawn from the lives of beings that companion us here: coyotes and mountains, porcupines and stars, a packrat, a hummingbird, hawks and starlings, snowmelt and the static of the cosmos. We follow their tracks across the fields or the skies or our own imaginings, sensing in their ongoingness  something of our own life’s meaning. Corcoran transmits, in her gentle way, that there is a world of dailiness to which we should attend, but that we can access, briefly, tentatively, another world within the pauses and spaces of that world. Another world which instructs us, wordlessly, but surely.

— Marjorie Stelmach, author of Night Drawings (awarded the Marianne Moore Prize) and Walking the Mist.


The “vigilant heart” that beats inside each of Sharon Corcoran’s poems shows us how to live our lives with kinder, deeper attention, leaning always into the now that she reminds us is ours. By turns playful and prayerful, Corcoran lovingly reveals the worlds that surround us, just beneath the surface of the everyday, inviting us to “own all there is, in memory, in praise.”

     —James Crews, Poet and Editor of The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy

Sharon Corcoran’s fine collection is a deeply contemplative map that illuminates two dimensions of experience: one that is external, physical, and wondrous in its detail, and another which is as dark and lovely as the early morning hours that begin her days. These poems are quietly reassuring, like a meandering stream in the high desert, offering praise for the miracle of being and the source from which it all flows.

       —Peter Anderson, author of Heading Home and First Church of the Higher Elevations


About the Author

Sharon Corcoran is a native of St. Louis now living in southern Colorado. She studied psychology and linguistics as an undergraduate, and completed an MFA degree in writing at Washington University in St. Louis. She translated (from French) the writings of North African explorer Isabelle Eberhardt in the works In the Shadow of Islam and Prisoner of Dunes published by Peter Owen Ltd., London.  Her first collection of poetry is Inventory, and her poetry has appeared in Kansas Quarterly, River Styx, and Canary, among other journals. The Two Worlds is her second book of poems. The first is titled Inventory.