FARMINGTON – Lee Sharkey’s book of poetry, “A Darker, Sweeter String,” has been published by Off the Grid Press, founded in 2005 to provide a forum for older, previously published poets.

In her poems, Sharkey “explores the disfigured psychic landscape of cruelty, violence, and war,” it’s written on www.offthegridpress.net. “Her lyric poems travel a geography that draws its imagery from Israel/Palestine, Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq, and small town USA, as well as from the intimate domains of sickness and birth.”

In 1974, Sharkey bought a 100-year-old Pearl platen press, taught herself to set type and print and produced her first poetry chapbook. Over the next four years, she printed two more chapbooks of her own poetry as well as portfolios of other poets’ work, under the imprint South Solon Press. Since then, she has worked both as a writer and as an editor.

Her publications include two full-length volumes, “Farmwife” (Puckerbrush Press, 1977) and “To A Vanished World” (Puckerbrush, 1995), a poem sequence in response to Roman Vishniac’s photographs of Eastern European Jewry in the years just preceding the Nazi Holocaust.

Some of her recent poems have been published in Green Mountains Review, Margie, Nimrod, The Pinch, Prairie Schooner and other journals. Since 2003, she has co-edited The Beloit Poetry Journal, one of the country’s oldest poetry journals.

Sharkey lives in the woods outside of Farmington, with her husband, Al Bersbach.

“A Darker, Sweeter String” is available at www.offthegridpress.net; Devaney, Doak and Garrett Booksellers, Farmington; Books, Etc… and Longfellow Books, Portland; Gulf of Maine Books, Brunswick; and other bookstores.

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