Published Collections

COMING IN MARCH 2013

Pre-Order now from publisher

The Year of Dead Fathers is the winner of the Fifth Annual Robert Watson Poetry Award. Limited copies are available from the author.

Maureen’s latest book of poems is available now from Finishing Line Press.

Sútra is a Sanskrit word that literally means thread. From its opening poem, Sútra, Maureen Sherbondy’s Scar Girl threads together a cautionary tale of a girl, scarred from life in a dysfunctional house, yet reaching for stars just out of reach. There is a clever stirring of Jack and Jill from nursery rhyme in a couple of poems, an appearance by King Kong in another, and a giant who annually tramples through her summer garden. Maureen Sherbondy masterfully stitches together poems that employ metaphor and image to set up superb endings. — Barry Harris, Editor Tipton Poetry Journal

Maureen A. Sherbondy’s Weary Blues resonates and haunts like any lyrical piece you can’t get out of your head. This is a musical poet who compellingly voices the complex strains of love, grief and survival. Her intimate and darkly memorable poems echo with regret for what breaks our hearts and spirits, but these brave poems also reverberate with stubborn hope. In her latest collection, she reminds us, with graceful insights and unforgettable images, of the restorative power of letting go, of honoring the present in order to move more strongly forward. — Linda Lee Harper, author of Toward Desire and Kiss Kiss

Maureen A. Sherbondy’s poems are straightforward, honest, and intuitive. While reading, one cannot help but pause and reflect upon life’s many choices and consequences. Weary Blues, despite its melancholy, does not drag the reader into depression. Rather, each struggle has an underlying tone of salvation that leaves one wondering. — Alexis Czencz Belluzzi, author of Practicing Distance

These private poems, made public, reveal our private selves. Whether we experience—experience rather than “read about”—a parent who must watch her son encounter the darkness of depression, or a girl accompanying her mother to a disappointing reading from a fortune teller, we intimately encounter not the author or even the characters, but ourselves, the self for which we thought there were no words. Sherbondy intercedes for us in the great battle we all face, the one far off, down deep, thereby showing us the victory we had begun to believe was too far off, too deep down, to achieve. — Paul Allen, author of Ground Forces and Crawl

Maureen’s first collection of short stories is now available directly from the publisher, Main Street Rag.

Stories from the collection have appeared in fine literary journals, including Stone Canoe, the North Carolina Literary Review, and others.

If you want to read short, quirky, versatile, thought-provoking stories, read this collection. I enjoyed the book very much, and I intend to keep Maureen A. Sherbondy on my radar as I read literary magazines and navigate through the literary world. — Rachel S. King, NewPages.com

In The Slow Vanishing, Maureen Sherbondy looks at our lives through a lens of fantasy and wisdom, then tells our stories in compelling and magical ways. Thought-provoking, entertaining, troubling, and true, these tales will have you nodding your head in recognition, eager to read more. — Therese Fowler, author of Souvenir

Off-beat stories with unexpected endings. Life’s ordinary problems intruded on by the bizarre. The Slow Vanishing has a mesmerizing, magical effect. — Joanna Catherine Scott, author of The Road from Chapel Hill

The writing is very evocative and interesting to read. I enjoyed each piece tremendously. — Karen Quinn, bestselling author of The Ivy Chronicles

What a wonderful collection this is. Maureen Sherbondy’s The Slow Vanishing is remarkable for its abundance, its variety, its range, and its sheer imagination. There are long, serious stories like “Opossum,” which begins the book, and “Last Respects,” which ends it. There are comic stories, very short stories (flash fictions), and in all of them Sherbondy’s gift for vivid, sharp imagery and telling detail shines forth. Everything seems to vanish—children, mothers, houses, comedians, body parts, husbands, even punctuation—and all this vanishing asks us to think about life without that which has vanished. And we do think. We laugh, we worry, we think, and we read on, because we want more. — Anthony S. Abbott, author of The Three Great Secret Things

Maureen Sherbondy’s new book of short stories, The Slow Vanishing, showcases the work of an unfailingly entertaining writer with a gift for dark humor and lots of tricks up her sleeve, but always in the service of deepening the reader’s understanding of the endless variations of human desperation that often haunt the most conventional of lives. Her adept use of the bizarre descriptive detail and quirky conversational tidbit enables her to create memorable characters that we end up rooting for, often within a very few pages, or even paragraphs, in the case of her shorter pieces, no matter how hapless their lot. These stories crackle with odd energy, and often leave the reader breathless with surprise, horrified and laughing at the same time. — Robert M. Colley, Associate Dean: University College of Syracuse University

Maureen’s second chapbook: It was recently reviewed in The Pilot Newspaper and at NewPages.com. Praying at Coffee Shops was named a winner in the poetry category of the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

What a thought-provoking collection for a Jewish audience! Moving from the concrete details of Jewish rituals to their spiritual implications, Sherbondy is full of wisdom and surprises- sometimes ironic, often dark, full of yearning for the tikkun olam seamstresses to stitch the broken world back together with their needles and threads. And what a treat, in the midst of the spiritual struggle, to find in the poet’s contemplation of a praying mantis that has landed on her prayer book, one of those rare, transcendent moments when “God’s long fingers are reaching, guiding us toward a promise.” These tough-minded, deceptively lovely poems yield up more of their considerable power with each successive reading. — Ellyn Bache

All in all, Praying at Coffee Shops is marvelously effective poetry, full of little realizations and multiple layers of meaning that the best poetry delights us with. — Roy Wang, NewPages.com Reviewer

This collection combines the appeal of archetype and the charm of wit with a great dose of wisdom. Sherbondy’s characters, a familiar lot of fairytale and beloved heroes and heroines, are navigated through the straits of reality by an ironic and gentle presence. The lessons learned from these poems are not unlike those learned from the fairytales: Snow White still finds that you can’t take anything at face value, but instead of confronting this painful truth through the vehicle of the shiny apple, she ends up at Planned Parenthood because her prince has no health insurance. Sherbondy’s poems are filled with subtle and pleasurable music, complementing the twist of beloved narrative into resonant truths. — Patty Seyburn, author of Diasporadic and Mechanical Cluster

Following the metamorphic tradition of Anne Sexton’s Transformations, the poems in After the Fairy Tale update the hitherto fictively blessed lives of personages (ranging from Snow White and Alice in Wonderland, to Dorothy Gale of Wizard of Oz fame), placing them in our own time in which the mundane is heroically tragic and psychic survival miraculous. Maureen Sherbondy has created emotionally sly and ironically precise poems that show that the magic beanstock is rooted in flat dull earth; the characters who have spent “the better” part of their lives in worlds of mystery and wonder have now returned to reality. That reality is unmistakably our own. — Steven B. Katz, poet, and Pearce Professor of Professional Communication, Clemson University

There’s a reason we call them fairy tales. Maureen Sherbondy’s poems show Snow White, Cinderella, and others mixed unhappily into modernity. Displaced and disillusioned, our childhood champions yearn for passion, endure the tedium of suburbia, and age awkwardly into nursing homes. Even their dreams don’t satisfy. Fancifully realistic, these poems revisit old friends with humor, pathos, and hard truths for us all. — Kenneth Chamlee, I. B. Seese Distinguished Service Professor of English and Creative Writing, Brevard College