Sweeping the Porch

By Sharon Perkins Ackerman

Sharon Perkins Ackerman lives in central Virginia with roots in Perry County, Kentucky, and her writing reflects the landscapes and voices of Appalachia. Her poetry appears widely in journals, and she is the author of A Legacy of Birds (Kelsay Books, 2025) and poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine.

Growing up as poet in Appalachia is a chance to be free and wildly woven into jagged indeterminate landscapes made habitable through hard work and surprise. In Sweeping the Porch, Sharon Perkins Ackerman remembers her Appalachian childhood. Her poems often describe lightning-quick spiritual epiphanies characterized by Nature's near inconspicuous
actions, as when "a bass leaps in water" and "holiness surfaces/in the splash of unexpected/sparkle cutting the murk." Often, she transects time and conflates tenses, manifesting a holiness she does not separate from the landscape and life-sustaining industries the landscape provides. Wisdom and holiness appear through interminable handson work, where "an onion sliced in half shows us/the myriad routes to its center"
-MATTIE QUESENBERRY SMITH, Ph.D, Virginia Poet Laureate, Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow

The title of Sharon Ackerman's Sweeping the Porch is telling, in its centering of everyday "small things," as well as the duality of that verb, which is not only about cleaning, butalso surveying with care. These poems do just that, arcing through the past and present, distance and nearness, shadow and sun, through memories in every season, a quiet, vibrant
tour through the personal history and nature of things: box fans, beech trees, shovels, pennies, wine goblets, coal mines, trains, kitchen tables, and a diner where the pre-dawn voicesof truck drivers are arias. Along the way, they embrace the physical world and the mystery inside it. Here, Ackerman shows us how to read the marks that have been made everywhere-anywhere-in one's locale, in an effort to discern "the larger song beneath it all."
-ANDY FOGLE, author of Mother Countries, poetry editor, Salvation South

In her moving new collection, Sweeping the Porch, Sharon Perkins Ackerman examines her family's past and present through its ties to particular landscapes of the South. Her subject throughout is the "deep green singing" she calls "memory." But these poems aren't stuck in an easy nostalgia. Instead, Ackerman takes on the task of exploring "the whole sum of our stories" in all their complexity. She creates a delicate balance between, for example, the grandfather who was a coal miner and knew "earth's darkness" and the writer herself, "who climbs...toward light." Her readers are fortunate to follow her on this journey.
-MARGARET MACKINNON, author of The Invented Child and Afternoon in Cartago

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1963110234
• ISBN13: 9781963110234
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Pine Row Press
• Length: 84 Pages
• Weight: 0.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"