“Sweeping the Porch” poetry collection by Sharon Perkins Ackerman

In her poem “Metamorphosis,” Sharon Perkins Ackerman confesses: “What I’ve never understood / is the nature of custody on earth, / the casings that hold us, / whether it’s true as they say, / the scant three feet between this world and the other.” Yet throughout her luminous collection, Sweeping the Porch (Pine Row Press, 2026), Ackerman moves gracefully between the “scant three feet” dividing the realms, blending the precise, tangible images of the physical world with the ethereal possibilities of the spiritual. With lines such as “I wonder at how / childhood is both weightless / and concrete,” from “A Haunting at Willard Creek,” she invites readers to enter “the mystery of remembrance, / the mind’s wiring to a world more fluid / than we perceive.” The result is an immersive and deeply affecting journey, one guided by the vivid natural landscape of her Appalachian childhood while remaining open to the lingering presence of the unseen. In poems such as “Water Speaks and is Gone,” for instance, she writes both of being a “child of the hollows” and of the “hill-heavy ghosts of my people / rowing in moon’s sheen,” capturing the way memory, place, and ancestral presence can coexist in a single landscape.

In this extraordinary collection of some fifty-plus radiant poems, which are divided into two numbered parts, the poet also recognizes the sheer curiosity of being. In the poem, “A Sudden Splash in the Pond,” she observes: “A bass leaps the water,” and then she wonders “at how things abide, or glide listening, / how even in deep spaces of bodies, / cells of stars gel and coalesce / to sleek, sudden presence.” In the end of this poem, she seems to accept the limits of language to fully express the mysteries and glories:

I wish I had a parable for fish

short of scripture, how at a given

moment, holiness surfaces

in the splash of unexpected

sparkle cutting the murk,

grabbing cold-blooded at the sun.

There’s something wonderful, even magical, about the way Ackerman combines the specificity and groundedness of nature with her meditations on the other realms to create poems that have both a sharp edge and an ethereal softness. “Perry County, 1968,” is a fine example of this magic where in a world with “hardwood blaze” and a creek “tumbling over shale,” there are also “gray ghosts the eye comprehends, / then doesn’t.” With her careful selection of imagery and language, Ackerman creates—or recreates—”this world / that does not wake from its dream.”

As Ackerman traverses the realms between tangible and intangible, she captures both awe and mystery, and in her evocative phrasing, she casts those emotions in fine-tuned phrases. In “Something More,” farmers “ask the secret questions of your life; / how perennials come back, / how the moon’s unspooling / siphons water up to moisten / seeds.” There is also the universal wonder “raised by the shining constants / of was and is and will be.” And too, as in the poem “Tally,” she wonders “what the final tally / of life will be.”

Thus, in some ways, the poet seeks to find herself both in and out of time, as well as among nature, within the limits of family and memory, between the familiar and unfamiliar, and amidst the unlimited mysteries of being. Once again, the poems crafted on those themes richly and eloquently combine the specific image with more fluid concepts. In “Field Notes on Time,” the poem’s narrator speaks of a tall brother, dirt scooped in hands, and mossy banks and then speaks of “the blurred / linear of age, where the story / of time, if time exists, hides in tenses of river rock, / past, present, future—”And in the poem “Stories,” she writes of “linoleum’s grit” and tiny moths and fireflies, to conclude the wings of a moth are “not so much like a smile / but the memory of one.”

In writing these lyrical, emotionally resonant poems, Ackerman uses wondrous verbs that uniquely frame her images and convey her message. The use of such distinctive and lively verbs enriches her poems and expands their vibrancy. Her vines do not simply climb, but her bittersweet vine “clenches its fist / around posts,” and her grapevine moves to “lasso the love of sun.” Her days “unlace themselves” and “skies dilate” in the “Hunter’s Moon.” In the poem “A Dry Spell in July They Say is Climate Change,” readers find “daisies panhandling / for rain.” In “A Late Summer Memory,” “the chill lames” the voices of grasshoppers. In her poem, “Where I Started Long Ago,” Ackerman’s “trees shadow the grass,” and “Shade pigments the yard” while in “Evening Creek,” the small stream “testifies in bits and pieces / of what grows along its banks.”

All in all, these are gorgeous poems, written by a poet with a keen eye, keen ear, curious mind, and gentle sensibilities. Ackerman also has a grand talent for bringing her readers into her lush and varied world and charming them once they enter that sphere, even if it is as she writes in “The Well,” “a world more fluid / than we can perceive,” or as in “Perry County, 1968,” a “world / that does not wake from its dream.”

Sharon Ackerman

As indicated in Sweeping the Porch, Sharon Ackerman has deep ancestral roots in Perry County, Kentucky, and her writing reflects the natural setting of coal-mining Kentucky, as well as the stories and cadences of the Appalachian Migration. Ackerman’s poetry has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Southern Humanities Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Blue Mountain Review, Kestrel, Roanoke Review, Cutleaf Journal, Appalachian Places, Salvation South, Broad River Review and several others. Her second poetry collection, A Legacy of Birds, (Kelsay Books, 2025), has been compared to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ecstatic nature and devotional poetry. She is the winner of the Hippocrates Poetry in Medicine international poetry contest, London 2019. She is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine and now lives in Virginia.

THE NORFOLK SOUTHERN

by Sharon Perkins Ackerman

(This copyrighted poem first appeared in Salvation South in May 2025 and appears in Sweeping the Porch. It is used here in its entirety with the permission of Ackerman.)

There’s a spot down the gravel road,
where the train curves close
enough to read painted logos, hear
its language I’ve forgotten

made of whippoorwills, the moon’s bright
stamp on a cloud. A random stand
of bloodwort watches too, tangled
at my ankles, dusted by the hot iron

chug where I see my sister and me,
eternally kids, grifting beside the tracks
for rocks. Granite or quartz prizes
in piles of gravel, maybe we play

a little chicken then, make the horn
blow its horsepower and diesel
our way. It’s good to have a place
so much yours you can die

there if you choose, pockets loaded
with secret stones. A man pauses
between boxes to wave, pony tail,
red kerchief in the wind,

where stacked platforms fly by
into a distance whose destination
I could look up—but maybe this once
I can let it go, not know the end.

There’s a spot down the gravel road,
where the train curves close
enough to read painted logos, hear
its language I’ve forgotten

made of whippoorwills, the moon’s bright
stamp on a cloud. A random stand
of bloodwort watches too, tangled
at my ankles, dusted by the hot iron

chug where I see my sister and me,
eternally kids, grifting beside the tracks
for rocks. Granite or quartz prizes
in piles of gravel, maybe we play

a little chicken then, make the horn
blow its horsepower and diesel
our way. It’s good to have a place
so much yours you can die

there if you choose, pockets loaded
with secret stones. A man pauses
between boxes to wave, pony tail,
red kerchief in the wind,

where stacked platforms fly by
into a distance whose destination
I could look up—but maybe this once
I can let it go, not know the end.