By Sharon White. Cornerstone Press, 2023.

In The Body Is Burden and Delight, Sharon White crafts a poetic mosaic that examines ecological communities in fragile northern landscapes, and in the geography of the poet’s daily life. Weaving poetry and prose, White attends to the voices of women from several places (and times), including Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Shetland, and Wales, exploring the inner landscape of myth and dreams inspired by a deep connection to the earth, and the beauty and loss inherent in those ecosystems. The collection is thoughtfully divided into sections – Spring, Simmer Dim, and Owl-light – each describing distinct cultural and ecological encounters, from the Sami homeland in Sweden to the historical resonance of Vilnius. White’s lyrical prose sensitively balances the haunting beauty of these places with the weight of cultural loss, while attending to the vital connections between communities and landscapes.

Sharon White is Associate Professor Emerita at Temple University and the author of several books of nonfiction and poetry. Her book Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia is the winner of the AWP award in creative nonfiction. Her book of very short fiction, Boiling Lake (On Voyage), won the Calvino Award.

Praise for The Body Is Burden and Delight

“First, Sharon White finds a mystical space, the top of the world, where there is snow, a mountain village, icy running water. Then she populates it. The inhabitants are mystical like the birds and animals. Sunlight but it doesn’t warm. Even someone doing ordinary housework has the flare of a goddess: ‘if there’s a bed there’s a woman making the bed/ solitary/ shaking the coverlet out like snow on the mountain,’ ‘sun blazing through curtains/ like a fiery knife.’This is a book filled with wit and wonder, ‘how,’ White says, ‘the Arctic must be melting, from the bottom up,’ with all that moves under the ice of knowing.”

—Elaine Terranova author of The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter and Dollhouse

“How does Sharon White manage to make everything seem so new, so freshly swept inside and out, and at the same time so ancient, primeval, raw—the world as it was before the first footprint? You can find yourself anywhere on earth in this book, and the message is the same.The landscape has its own story.This poet takes on the powers of Eve to rewild all of it.”

—Karen Donovan author of Monad+Monadnock