Customer Reviews:

• "Sharlie West is a deep and mysterious poet. Reading through her latest book is a dark irresistible journey, and you cannot stop. The poems have an amazing impact. Read it once. Read it again." - Sauci Churchill

• "Sharlie West's "House of Bones" is a stunning creation: images vivid and riveting, memories of love and loss we are sure, like our own, will be unrelenting - each an exquisite bone in a jeweled setting that the reader will not forget without an ache. The poems melt seamlessly one into the next, almost whisper as they swish white satin across the page, like a shroud for the subject who "danced that night full and round", who is told "we are just beginning...as the last door closed", who must "run against the wind to find his path", his voice now "an emptiness that might go on forever". Somewhere she has lost her name, but time is on her side under "a winking sun" - she will find a new name for the reader and herself." - Kathleen Adcock

• "Sharlie West's work moves easily from metaphor to metaphor, as she has such control of the language. Her poems make her imagination seem real, as she takes the reader through her imaginative journey, exploring mostly raw emotion, desires, secrets. She is poised and always admirable. Also a very cohesive book, I highly recommend giving "House of Bones" a read." - Alex Markoff

• "One is not quite sure who or what wrote these poems: was it an hopeful wise woman, a spirit wind, an observant falling leaf or a forgotten log in a old woodpile? Take a walk in the unknown world and unknowable mind of Ms. West. She keeps you thinking, guessing your motives, challenging your understandings of life, love and especially keeps you wondering what is in that last room, that space that surrounds your version of sanity, of reality and illusion. Great work to expand the body, mind and spirit!!" - David Cockrell

• "Sharlie West is a poet that not only honors the elements of nature but respects them. She is particularly enamored of the water element which she uses here to an enigmatic advantage. She often uses the details of nature and of life, for that matter, in a manner that is both familiar and mysterious. Each poem is delicately flavored in the ambiguous from the cross of each to each ghoulish tampolean comma. House of Bones are poems to read, Sharlie West is a poet to watch." - Roberto Christiano.

• ""I made room for death" is only one example of the many, many poems by West that make her, in my eyes, a modern-day Emily Dickinson. Through use of a natural metaphor, West communicates the fact she's on a first-name basis with death, while imaginatively dramatizing the widespread discomfort people feel toward the bereaved. West is never merely quirky: her piercingly fresh associations point to unarticulated human paradoxes, absurdities, or conflicts that characterize human experience and human interrelations. Her canny, profound insights into abstract, general phenomena are coupled with a masterful use of achingly precise language that hones in on the essential uniqueness of the world of things, as it is subjectively experienced by a sensibility that is, in turn, intense, ironic, stoic, romantic, compassionate, dream-laden, and spiritual. Readers of this chapbook will want to look at her earlier ones to slake their hunger for more of her exceptional work." - Norma Schulman